Pieter Wuille, a renowned BTC core developer is cutting back on contributions to the project. He says that he will still do coding and play a key role in the BTC ecosystem. He just does not want to do maintenance work anymore and gave up access to permissions.
Essential facts to note are:
- Bitcoin Core is the main implemented aspect of the software and a blockchain connection. Developers do a lot of open-source work, critical research, testing, review work of other developers and generate documentation. Only a very small group which has commit access is able to get to the core code and merge new changes in code.
- Until recently, Wuille was a part of this group. Now that he has opted to leave, just four people remain. They are they only ones who have commit access. This group consists of Wladimir van der Laan, Michael Ford, Marco Falke and Hennadii Stepanov.
- Wuille sent in his request to get his key removed from the trusted keys set on July 7th, Thursday.
- He has made many contributions to BTC Core since it was set up in 2011. The most noteworthy among these are BIP 32, SegWit, and Taproot to name a few. All of these contributions helped in private key recovery (BIP 32), efficient block storage (SegWit) and tools to integrate features like privacy (Taproot).
- In the last 18 months, many BTC developers have decided to leave their previous roles. This includes maintainers. Some of the big names include Jonas Schnelli and John Newberry.
