With Falke's departure, only four maintainers are left to look after Bitcoin's most popular implementation.
On Tuesday, bitcoin developer Marco Falke announced his resignation as Bitcoin Core maintainer.
The protocol now has only four maintainers left: Michael Ford, Hennadii Stepanov, Andrew Chow, and Gloria Zhao.
Falke was the single largest contributor to Bitcoin Core, proposing more than 2,000 individual changes - known as "commits" - to Bitcoin's codebase during his lifetime.
In three of the seven years he has been a maintainer, Falke has been supported and sponsored by cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin and Web3 investment firm Paradigm.
"I'm still passionate about open source and Bitcoin, and I'm confident about the future, but being a maintainer no longer suits me personally," Falke wrote on Twitter. "I'm happy with my accomplishments and recognize that if These achievements would not be possible without my sponsors.”
As a maintainer, Falke's job is to perform quality assurance testing and approve new changes to the Bitcoin code on GitHub.
Over the past two years, other Bitcoin development giants have stepped away from maintainer roles, including John Newbery, Samuel Dobson, Jonas Schnelli, Peter Wuille and Wladimir J. van der Laan - the latter of whom is the former chief of Bitcoin Core maintainer.
In Schneilli's case, shifting interests from core developers and mounting legal risks prompted his departure in 2021. In fact, Bitcoin developers still face legal pressure from the likes of Craig Wright, who claims to be Bitcoin’s mysterious creator.