Bitcoin Developer Matt Corallo Calls for GitHub Exodus Following Rust Lightning Ban

For more than a decade, GitHub has served as the central hub for Bitcoin Core and countless other projects within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. But its reign as the go-to platform for open-source Bitcoin development may be coming to an end — and a recent ban involving the Rust Lightning project has accelerated that conversation significantly.

Matt Corallo, one of the most enduring contributors to Bitcoin Core, recently went public on X about a troubling situation affecting the Rust Lightning dev kit, a project he is deeply involved with. The issue began when GitHub flagged a contributor — not an admin or maintainer, but simply a newcomer who had submitted a few pull requests. As a result, Corallo's organization was left without any CI (continuous integration) processes, effectively crippling its quality testing workflows. Despite escalating the matter through corporate account managers, little resolution followed.

The situation worsened shortly after. Corallo announced that GitHub had issued a permanent ban against the open-source project, offering no explanation and no path for appeal. In his own words, GitHub cited terms of service violations that, according to Corallo, bore no relevance to anything the project had ever done. His conclusion was direct: it was time for Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub.

The contributor at the center of the initial ban appears to be Luis Schwab, who noted that his account had been incorrectly banned twice within a single week. He echoed Corallo's sentiments, warning that depending on GitHub's goodwill is not a sustainable long-term strategy. Other prominent voices in the Bitcoin and crypto development space chimed in with their own grievances. Roman Storm, for instance, revealed that back in 2022, GitHub had locked his account in connection with Tornado Cash sanctions — despite him being a U.S. citizen. He was instructed to obtain an OFAC license just to regain access to his own account. The sanctions were later ruled unlawful and overturned, yet his account remains locked to this day, with support tickets going unanswered.

Corallo attributes much of the platform's recent dysfunction to the AI boom. The explosion of so-called "vibe coding" has flooded GitHub with amateur projects, automated bot activity, and a surge of low-quality submissions. The platform, which now claims to host over 420 million repositories and more than 4 million organizations globally, appears to be struggling under the weight of this growth. Many longtime users also point to Microsoft's 2018 acquisition of GitHub as a turning point in the platform's trajectory.

Andrew Poelstra, another senior contributor to both Bitcoin Core and Rust Lightning with over a decade of industry experience, offered a sharp critique of the platform in support of the migration decision. He highlighted the sheer volume of AI-generated content polluting the platform and pointed to a blog post in which GitHub appeared to take credit for the success of free and open-source software — a move Poelstra viewed as tone-deaf. More critically, he noted that GitHub's core merging functionality had been broken for several days, disrupting the merge script responsible for ensuring that code updates are applied securely and correctly.

The bug caused significant confusion in how pull requests were tracked and merged, which Poelstra described as a fundamental failure. "Tracking PRs is the one thing GitHub is supposed to do," he wrote, adding that the usual issues — hidden diffs, sluggish performance, a broken permissions model, poor API — were tolerable only as long as the basic features worked. They no longer do.

With trust in GitHub eroding, the Rust Lightning project is now eyeing Forgejo as its next home. Forgejo is a lightweight, open-source platform designed with self-hosting and high-agency projects in mind. Corallo confirmed that rust-bitcoin has already begun migrating to git.rust-bitcoin.org, with Rust Lightning set to follow. While the repositories may continue to maintain a mirror on GitHub for the time being, no formal long-term mirroring strategy has been announced, suggesting the projects will ultimately reside entirely on their own infrastructure.