Frederick Munawa
Frederick Munawa is a Technology Reporter for Coindesk. He covers blockchain protocols with a specific focus on bitcoin and bitcoin-adjacent networks.
Belgian-born Bitcoin Core developer, Peter Wuille is scaling back his contributions to Bitcoin Core. Nevertheless, he will continue contributing code to the project and remains a key player in the Bitcoin ecosystem, given both his influence in the Bitcoin community and his role at Chaincode Labs.
To be clear: I won't stop contributing to code, review, and all the projects I'm involved in. It just so happens I'm not doing much maintenance anymore, so it's time to drop my permissions. https://t.co/8OAJaw02MM
— Pieter Wuille (@pwuille) July 7, 2022
- Bitcoin Core is the primary implementation of the Bitcoin software that connects to the blockchain. Open-source developers provide vital research, peer review, testing and documentation. A small group with commit access can directly access Bitcoin Core’s code in order to merge new code changes.
- Up until now, Wuille was part of this smaller group. With his departure, only four developers remain with commit access: Wladimir J. van der Laan, Marco Falke, Michael Ford and Hennadii Stepanov.
- He made the request to remove his key from the set of trusted keys through the Bitcoin GitHub on Thursday.
- Wuille has made thousands of contributions to Bitcoin Core since 2011, most notably Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP 32), which introduced seed phrases for storing and recovering private keys; Segregated Witness (SegWit) which provided a new, efficient way of storing data in blocks; and, more recently, Taproot (BIPs 340, 341 and 342), which provided developers with a valuable set of tools to integrate new features that will improve privacy, scalability and security.
- Over the past year and a half, several Bitcoin developers and maintainers have chosen to leave their various roles, including John Newbery, Samuel Dobson and Jonas Schnelli.