After four years of work funded by Brink and hundreds of commits to Bitcoin Core, Zhao concludes her experience as a maintainer.
Gloria Zhao has revoked her signing PGP key for Bitcoin Core, confirming her departure from the maintainer role. The announcement was posted on her GitHub profile on February 5.
Bitcoin Core maintainers are responsible for reviewing and approving code updates and digitally signing official releases with cryptographic keys.
In January 2021, Zhao joined Brink, a non-profit organization supported by the Human Rights Foundation and Spiral. On July 7, 2022, her PGP key was added to Bitcoin Core’s trusted-keys file, making her a maintainer coinciding with Pieter Wuille’s departure. She was the first known woman in this role, appointed by community consensus.
Zhao specialized in mempool policy, transaction relay, and fee estimation. She worked on package relay (BIP 331), TRUC (BIP 431), RBF, and peer-to-peer protocol improvements to reduce inefficiencies and censorship vectors. She contributed hundreds of commits to Bitcoin Core, including pull request reviews and participation in the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club.
The former maintainer began contributing to Bitcoin Core in 2020. As of August 2025, Zhao had made 837 contributions in the past year across Bitcoin/bitcoin and related repositories. In January 2025, Brink celebrated her four years of full-time work on Bitcoin Core.
