Wladimir van der Laan is a software developer who served as the Lead Maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repository on GitHub from 2014 to 2022 — the longest tenure of any Bitcoin lead maintainer.
Bitcoin Core
From mid-2010 until April 2014, Gavin Andresen maintained control of the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository. On April 8, 2014, Andresen stepped down and van der Laan took over as Lead Maintainer. His salary was funded by MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.
As Lead Maintainer, van der Laan managed the process of merging code contributions, coordinating releases, and maintaining the project’s development workflow. He was known for a cautious, consensus-driven approach — insisting that code changes achieve broad agreement among contributors before being merged.
Stepping Down
In August 2022, van der Laan announced he was stepping back from his role as Lead Maintainer, citing burnout and the toll of maintaining such a critical open-source project. Rather than appointing a single successor, the project moved to a distributed maintainer model with multiple maintainers sharing responsibilities, including Gloria Zhao, Ava Chow (achow101), and Michael Ford (fanquake).
Legacy
Van der Laan’s eight-year tenure as Lead Maintainer spanned Bitcoin’s growth from a niche experiment to a globally recognized asset class. He guided the project through the contentious block size debate, the activation of SegWit, and the Taproot upgrade, while maintaining Bitcoin Core’s reputation for conservative, security-first development.
Related people
Bitcoin Core
