Gloria Zhao, a prominent Bitcoin Core maintainer, has stepped down from her role after approximately six years of contributions to the project. She submitted a final pull request on the Bitcoin GitHub repository, removing herself from the list of trusted keys and maintainers.
She also revoked her PGP signing key, a standard procedure when departing such a position to ensure no further official releases are signed under her credentials. Zhao joined as a maintainer in 2022, becoming the first known woman in that role, succeeding Pieter Wuille.
Funded in part by Brink (a nonprofit supporting Bitcoin development), she specialized in critical areas like mempool policy (rules for transaction acceptance in nodes’ memory pools), transaction relay, fee estimation, peer-to-peer protocol enhancements, and related Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) such as package relay (BIP 331), TRUC (BIP 431), and RBF (Replace-By-Fee) improvements.
Her work helped improve transaction propagation, reduce inefficiencies, and mitigate potential censorship risks in the network.The departure appears amicable and routine for open-source projects — maintainers come and go without impacting Bitcoin’s consensus rules, network security, or transaction processing.
Bitcoin Core remains maintained by a small group of trusted contributors, and her exit creates a vacancy but no immediate operational concerns. Some reports describe her as “controversial” amid past debates on policy changes or community dynamics, but the move is widely viewed as a normal transition.
Pieter Wuille is a Belgian computer scientist and one of the most influential Bitcoin Core developers. He discovered Bitcoin in late 2010 and began contributing to Bitcoin Core then Bitcoin-Qt in May 2011.
Over more than a decade, he authored or co-authored numerous key improvements, focusing on performance, security, privacy, scalability, and usability. He held maintainer status with commit access from around 2011 until July 2022, when he stepped down from that role but continued contributing code, reviews, and related projects.
Wuille has been recognized for his work, including receiving the Finney Freedom Prize in January 2025 shared with Gregory Maxwell from the Human Rights Foundation for advancements in Bitcoin’s usability, scalability, and privacy during Bitcoin’s early growth phase roughly 2012-2016.
Rainbow Wallet’s RNBW Token Goes Live
Rainbow Wallet, a popular non-custodial Ethereum wallet known for its user-friendly interface, NFT support, and multi-chain features (especially on Ethereum and Layer-2s like Base), has launched its native token $RNBW.
The Token Generation Event (TGE) occurred on February 5, 2026, at around 13:00 UTC, converting the existing Rainbow Points loyalty program earned via swaps, holdings, referrals, etc., since late 2023 into on-chain tokens. Users can claim their airdropped allocations directly in the Rainbow app under the Rewards tab.
Total supply: 1 billion RNBW. Initial circulating supply: Roughly 18-20% at launch including ~15% for airdrops to points earners and other allocations. Powers governance, rewards, staking/incentives, and ecosystem features in Rainbow’s “onchain Robinhood”-style app. Live on major exchanges like Gate.io, KuCoin, MEXC, Coinbase, and others, plus Uniswap via a CCA auction for fair price discovery and liquidity bootstrapping on Uniswap v4.
Contract address on Base http://0xa53887F7e7c1bf5010b8627F1C1ba94fE7a5d6E0:Post-launch, the token experienced volatility — initial hype drove prices up with some all-time highs around $0.11 reported early, but it quickly corrected, trading in the $0.03-$0.04 range in recent data amid broader market conditions and reports of launch hiccups.
Some early CoinList buyers at ~$0.10 faced losses, but the project positions $RNBW as a step toward community governance and real utility in wallet/DeFi activities. Both events highlight ongoing evolution in Bitcoin’s core development and Ethereum’s wallet/DeFi ecosystems — decentralized projects rely on contributor transitions and token incentives to sustain growth.
