Matt Corallo has been contributing to Bitcoin Core longer than almost anyone. So when he says it’s time for Bitcoin projects to abandon GitHub, people listen.
The breaking point? GitHub permanently banned the Rust Lightning development kit — no explanation, no appeal process. Corallo says the platform flagged a regular contributor (not a maintainer, just someone who opened a few pull requests), killed their CI pipelines, and then nuked the whole organization. Escalations through corporate account managers went nowhere.
“I guess it’s time for Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub,” Corallo wrote. And he’s not alone. Luis Schwab, the contributor who got caught in the crossfire, says his personal account was banned twice within a week — both times “by mistake.” Roman Storm, who built Tornado Cash, has been locked out of his account since 2022 over sanctions that were later ruled unlawful. He’s filed ticket after ticket. They don’t even respond anymore.
Andrew Poelstra, another senior Bitcoin contributor, didn’t hold back either. He called the platform overrun with AI-generated slop, said the merge functionality has been broken for days, and pointed out the irony: the one thing GitHub is supposed to do well — track pull requests — doesn’t work anymore.
So where are they going? Forgejo, a lightweight self-hosted alternative. Rust Bitcoin has already started migrating to git.rust-bitcoin.org. Rust Lightning will follow. They’ll probably keep a mirror on GitHub for now, but the message is clear: the platform that once hosted the internet’s open-source crown jewels has become too unreliable — and too arbitrary with its enforcement — for projects that can’t afford to lose access overnight.
