TL;DR
- Gloria Zhao resigns as a Bitcoin Core maintainer after six influential years.
- Her key contributions include mempool policy, package relay, and RBF improvements.
- Her departure follows public conflicts and personal attacks over OP_RETURN limits.
Gloria Zhao, one of the most influential protocol engineers at Bitcoin Core, left her role as maintainer and revoked her PGP signing key after six years steering technical decisions on the project. Last Thursday, she submitted her final pull request to Bitcoin’s GitHub repository, removing her access to update the network’s software.
Zhao became the first documented female maintainer in 2022. Her work focused on mempool policy and transaction relay: the rules that determine which transactions enter nodes’ waiting queue and how fast they spread across the network. She designed and implemented package relay (BIP 331) and TRUC (BIP 431), plus improvements to the replace-by-fee mechanism (RBF), making fee bumps more reliable and reducing censorship on the network.
The organization Brink funded her work since 2021, when Zhao was their first fellow. Backing from the Human Rights Foundation and Jack Dorsey’s Spiral (formerly Square Crypto) supported her position as a full-time open-source engineer. Beyond coding, she mentored new contributors and ran the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club, teaching junior developers how to review complex changes.
The OP_RETURN tensions accelerate her departure
Her resignation comes after more than a year of public conflicts between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots over OP_RETURN limits. The dispute centered on whether Bitcoin’s default node software should make it harder to use block space for non-monetary data. In 2025, Zhao deleted her X account after personal attacks during this fight, following a livestream where a core developer publicly questioned her credentials.
While some Bitcoin Core critics celebrated her departure, others took a different tone. User Pledditor wrote that “they harassed her until they made her life miserable until she angrily left” and called the situation a “terrible precedent”. Chris Seedor, cofounder of wallet backup company Seedor, stated: “Congratulations, you finally did it. You harassed one of Bitcoin Core’s most prolific maintainers until she gave up.”
Zhao’s exit marks a tense moment in Bitcoin Core governance, exposing fractures over how the community should balance the network’s technical uses.
