Bitcoin Core Maintainer Gloria Zhao Quits After Six Years
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.
She became the first known female maintainer in 2022 and 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. Zhao helped design and implement package relay (BIP 331) and TRUC (Topologically Restricted Until Confirmation, BIP 431), along with upgrades to replace‑by‑fee (RBF) and broader P2P behavior, making fee bumping more reliable and reducing censorship.