Bitcoin Developers Push to Abandon GitHub Following Rust Lightning Crackdown

For more than a decade, GitHub has served as the primary home for Bitcoin Core and countless other projects within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. However, the platform's dominance may be coming to an end — at least for a growing segment of the Bitcoin developer community.

A surge of criticism directed at GitHub has reignited long-standing frustrations with the platform's reliability, moderation practices, and overall design. The latest flashpoint came when Matt Corallo, one of the most veteran contributors to Bitcoin Core, publicly announced plans to migrate the Rust Lightning development kit — a project he is deeply involved with — away from GitHub.

Corallo took to X to explain the situation, stating that his organization had been left without any continuous integration (CI) processes after GitHub incorrectly flagged a contributor. Importantly, this was not an administrator or maintainer, but simply a newcomer who had submitted a handful of pull requests. Despite escalating the matter through corporate account managers, the issue went unresolved.

Approximately a week later, Corallo provided a further update, revealing that GitHub had permanently banned the open-source project with no explanation and no path to appeal. The company pointed to its Terms of Service, despite those terms not appearing to cover any of the project's activities. "I guess it's time for Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub," Corallo wrote.

The contributor at the center of the ban appears to be Luis Schwab, who noted that his account had been banned twice within a single week, both times described as a mistake. Schwab concluded that depending on GitHub's goodwill is not a viable long-term strategy.

Other Bitcoin and crypto engineers chimed in with their own troubling experiences. Roman Storm recalled how, in 2022, GitHub locked his account in connection with Tornado Cash sanctions, despite his being a U.S. citizen. He was told to obtain an OFAC license simply to access his own account. The sanctions were later ruled unlawful and overturned, yet his account remains locked to this day, with GitHub no longer even responding to his support tickets.

Corallo attributes the recent wave of account bans and increasingly aggressive platform behavior to the explosion of AI-driven development. The rise of so-called "vibe coding" has flooded GitHub with amateur projects and bot-like automated activity. The platform currently claims to host over 420 million repositories and more than 4 million organizations globally. GitHub's 2018 acquisition by Microsoft has also drawn criticism, with some observers linking the platform's decline to that corporate transition.

Andrew Poelstra, another seasoned contributor to both Bitcoin Core and Rust Lightning with over a decade in the industry, offered a similarly sharp critique. He described GitHub as overwhelmed by AI-generated content, noting the platform showed no real intention of addressing the problem. He also highlighted that core merging functionality had been broken for several consecutive days, disrupting the merge script — a critical security tool ensuring that code updates are applied correctly.

The malfunction meant that tracking and merging pull requests from other developers was no longer functioning as intended. Poelstra argued that if GitHub cannot reliably perform its most basic function, there is no longer any compelling reason to remain on the platform.

The leading candidate for migration appears to be Forgejo, a lightweight and self-hostable alternative designed for high-agency open-source projects. Corallo confirmed that rust-bitcoin had already begun moving to git.rust-bitcoin.org, with Rust Lightning expected to follow. While the repositories will likely maintain a mirror copy on GitHub for the time being, no long-term mirroring strategy has been officially announced, suggesting the projects will eventually exist exclusively on their own infrastructure.