on January 8, 2026, the Bitcoin core development team promoted the anonymous developer TheCharlatan (sedited) to Trusted Keys maintainer, joining Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow as the sixth trusted key holder. This is the first expansion of core members with main branch commit rights since May 2023. It is reported that TheCharlatan graduated from the University of Zurich with a degree in computer science, mainly focusing on reproducible builds and verification logic. His appointment received unanimous support in the core contributor discussions.