Dobson’s departure followed the October exit of Bitcoin Core code maintainer Jonas Schnelli, who cited the stress of increasing legal risks for developers. According to Bitcointalk.org, the maintainers with commit access to Bitcoin’s code currently numbers just three people: Wladimir J. van der Laan, Marco Falke and Michael Ford. There are also two people with commit access who are not maintainers–Pieter Wuille and Hennadii Stepanov. And while there are many Core developers and contributors working on Bitcoin’s code, only maintainers and those with commit access are able to merge new code with the existing Bitcoin Core code.
