GitHub has hosted Bitcoin Core and dozens of other cryptocurrency projects for over a decade. That relationship is fraying fast.
Matt Corallo, a Bitcoin Core contributor for years, announced this week that Rust Lightning—a development kit he oversees—is moving off GitHub. The trigger was blunt: GitHub wrongly flagged a new contributor named Luis Schwab, froze the account, and disabled the project's continuous integration testing. When Corallo escalated through corporate channels, nothing changed. A week later, GitHub permanently banned the entire Rust Lightning organization with no explanation and no appeal process.
"GitHub has decided our open-source project has been permanently banned with no explanation and no option to appeal, pointing to a ToS that clearly does not cover anything we've ever done," Corallo wrote on X. "I guess it's time for Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub."
GitHub has decided our open-source project has been permanently banned with no explanation and no option to appeal, pointing to a ToS that clearly does not cover anything we've ever done,
He is not alone. Roman Storm, a developer who was locked out in 2022 over OFAC sanctions on Tornado Cash (sanctions that were later ruled unlawful), said his account remains frozen despite repeated support tickets. Schwab reported being banned twice within a week. Andrew Poelstra, another senior Bitcoin Core and Rust Lightning contributor, published a detailed critique of GitHub's operational collapse: the platform's merge functionality broke for several days, the permissions model is "insane and broken," and the site is slow and unreliable. "Tracking PRs is the one thing GitHub is supposed to do, and it's broken," Poelstra wrote. "It's no longer more convenient to stay here than to leave."
Corallo tied the bans to what he called "the AI wave." GitHub now hosts over 420 million repositories and 4 million organizations, making moderation chaotic. Automated systems flag accounts at scale; appeals disappear into silence. The problem predates GitHub's 2018 acquisition by Microsoft, but the company's focus on machine-learning integration has accelerated the friction.
The exodus is already underway. Rust Lightning will migrate to Forgejo, a lightweight GitHub alternative designed for self-hosted projects and high-autonomy teams. Corallo confirmed that rust-bitcoin has already begun moving to git.rust-bitcoin.org. Repositories will likely maintain read-only mirrors on GitHub for now, but the canonical versions will live on infrastructure controlled by the projects themselves.
This marks a strategic shift for Bitcoin development. GitHub was chosen because it offered convenience and network effects—collaboration tools, visibility, contributor discovery. If those tools become unreliable or hostile, the case for staying collapses. Developers can run Forgejo or Git on their own servers. Version control is a solved problem. The only reason to use a centralized platform was that it worked better. It no longer does, at least for projects GitHub's automated systems can catch.