The governance of Bitcoin Core development

The administration of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) faced a bottleneck due to the concentration of merge authority in a single role. For a decade, Luke Dashjr served as the sole BIP editor, which meant that even minor updates required his personal approval to enter the GitHub repository. This centralization caused frustration when authors completed requested changes but waited months for a response. Ava Chow led a months-long effort to nominate five new editors to solve this issue. The new editors are Bryan Bishop, Murch, Ruben Somsen, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and Jonatack. This group aims to increase efficiency for both trivial tasks like fixing typos and the evaluation of whether a new proposal deserves to be classified as a BIP. One could ask if this increased number of editors will actually speed up the consensus process or just create more debate. The nomination process began in January following a recommendation from AJ Towns and was finalized after Jonatack made several modifications to the BIP GitHub repository. Chow, who has at least four open BIPs, notes that the line between what is and isn’t a BIP remains fuzzy.

Bitcoin Core developers coordinate through a voluntary, meritocratic system where individuals take responsibility for specific technical domains. This coordination helps the project manage large-scale upgrades despite the lack of a central leader.

Gloria Zhao manages the package relay project to address vulnerabilities in the mempool. This initiative redesigns the policy logic and peer-to-peer messaging to allow related transactions to be treated as a single package. This redesign helps prevent transaction pinning, where an attacker keeps a transaction at a low fee rate to hinder a user. To fully eliminate pinning vectors, the team also discusses version three transactions and ephemeral anchors. Package relay aims to correct a fundamental problem with the design of the mempool. The current design considers each transaction individually, which creates weaknesses for off-chain protocols like Lightning. Sebastian Kung leads the libbitcoinkernel project to centralize consensus rules. By isolating these rules into a dedicated library, the project enables developers to build different node implementations, such as those using the Rust programming language. This library also assists hardware and mobile wallets with better security checks. Pieter Wuille owns the BIP 324 project, which focuses on encrypting the peer-to-peer protocol. This upgrade adds random obfuscation to prevent attackers from using traffic analysis to identify node runners. The protocol is opt-in to ensure backward compatibility with unencrypted nodes. Ava Chow focuses on wallet functionality, specifically the migration to descriptor wallets. This architecture uses output descriptors to define how keys and scripts are derived, replacing the legacy wallet format.

Recent updates to Bitcoin Core aim to close security gaps in signature handling and improve transaction privacy. In September 2025, developers merged a fix into the development branch to address a weakness in the SIGHASH_SINGLE signing mode. This weakness allows for potential signature reuse in legacy and SegWit v0 transactions if the destination output is missing. For legacy inputs, the missing-output case can produce a signature over a fixed hash value. This signature may then be reusable against other unspent outputs controlled by the same key when the same structural conditions are present. SegWit v0 transactions retain stronger protections because the signature still commits to the specific coin being spent and its amount. The destination output, however, can remain unbound. This creates an authorization problem for wallets and signing devices. The new code moves the check into the shared signature-creation logic. This prevents the issue from reaching the signing stage and allows other valid inputs in the same PSBT to proceed. This safeguard is essential for Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT), which facilitate coordination between software wallets and hardware devices. Ava Chow authored the BIP 174 specification, which defines the standard format for these partially signed transactions. Her work ensures that hardware wallets can interact smoothly with different transaction builders. Without these safeguards, a software wallet might present one payment to a user while producing a signature that does not guarantee the recipient remains unchanged. If you think the current pace of development satisfies all users, you might overlook the friction caused by these technical hurdles.