Bitcoin Core dev Gloria Zhao quits maintainer role after six-year stint

Bitcoin Core maintainer Gloria Zhao has stepped down and revoked her PGP signing key after six years as one of the project’s most influential mempool and policy engineers.

Bitcoin Core developer Gloria Zhao has stepped down as a maintainer and revoked her Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) signing key, ending about six years as one of the project’s gatekeepers. 

On Thursday, Zhao submitted her last pull request to the Bitcoin GitHub repository, removing her key from the trusted keys and withdrawing herself as one of the few maintainers able to update Bitcoin’s software.

Becoming the first known female maintainer in 2022, she focused on mempool policy and transaction relay: the rules and peer‑to‑peer logic that decide which transactions get into nodes’ waiting rooms and how quickly they propagate across the network. 

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