Bitcoin Core maintainer Gloria Zhao steps down and revokes signing key

Zhao submitted a pull request to the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository removing her key from the trusted keys list and withdrawing herself from the small group of maintainers who can merge changes and sign official releases.

In the GitHub discussion, Zhao noted that the last merge signed with her key was 88a7294 and asked maintainers to bump trusted-git-root to that commit.

During her tenure, Zhao focused on mempool policy and transaction relay, the rules and peer to peer logic that shape which transactions nodes accept and how they propagate through the network. Her work included efforts around package relay and Topologically Restricted Until Confirmation, as well as changes tied to replace by fee behavior and broader peer to peer reliability.

Zhao’s development work has been funded through Brink, where she became the organization’s first fellow in 2021, with support cited from the Human Rights Foundation Bitcoin Development Fund and Jack Dorsey’s Spiral, formerly Square Crypto. She also mentored new contributors and co ran the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club.

Her departure follows a prolonged public dispute over transaction policy, including arguments around OP_RETURN defaults and competing node software such as Bitcoin Knots. Zhao deleted her X account in 2025 amid personal attacks linked to that debate, according to prior coverage.