On Tuesday, Bitcoin developer Marco Falke announced his resignation as Bitcoin Core maintainer. The protocol now has just four maintainers left: Michael Ford, Hennadii Stepanov, Andrew Chow, and Gloria Zhao.
Falke is the largest single contributor to Bitcoin Core, proposing over 2,000 individual changes or “commits” to Bitcoin’s codebase during his lifetime. In three of his seven years as a maintainer, Falke has received support and sponsorship from cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin and Web3 investment firm Paradigm.
"I'm still passionate about open source and Bitcoin, and I'm confident in the future, but being a maintainer is no longer for me personally," Falke wrote on Twitter. These achievements would not have been possible without my sponsors." As a maintainer, Falke's job is to conduct quality assurance testing and approve new changes to the Bitcoin code on GitHub.
Over the past two years, other titans of Bitcoin development have stepped down from maintainer roles, including John Newbery, Samuel Dobson, Jonas Schnelli, Peter Wuille, and Wladimir J. van der Laan the former head of Bitcoin Core. maintainer.
In Schneilli's case, a combination of shifting interests and growing legal exposure for core developers prompted his departure in 2021. In fact, Bitcoin developers are still facing legal pressure from the likes of Craig Wright, who claims to be Bitcoin's mysterious creator.
