Her final pull request appeared on February 5. She also revoked her PGP signing key, which closed her responsibilities as one of the few people who could merge changes into Bitcoin Core.
Zhao became the first publicly known female maintainer in 2022. She focused on mempool policy and transaction relay.
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These areas define how nodes decide which transactions enter their waiting queues and how they move across the network.
Her work included contributions to package relay (BIP 331) and TRUC, also known as Topologically Restricted Until Confirmation (BIP 431). She also helped improve replace-by-fee and other peer-to-peer behaviors.
These changes aimed to make fee increases more consistent and to reduce transaction censorship.
She received funding from Brink. She joined the organization as its first fellow in 2021. Her fellowship was supported by the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund and Jack Dorsey’s Spiral.
This placed her in a small group of full-time, publicly supported Bitcoin protocol developers.
Zhao also helped new contributors. She mentored early-stage developers and co-ran the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club. The club helped newcomers learn how to handle review work and understand the project’s cautious approach to code changes.
Meanwhile, Ethereum
