Matt Corallo urges Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub
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- Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo has urged Bitcoin projects to move away from GitHub after the Rust Lightning project was permanently banned without explanation.
- The incident has renewed concerns among Bitcoin developers over GitHub's reliability, moderation practices and dependence on a centralised platform.
- Rust Lightning is expected to migrate to a self-hosted Forgejo instance, with other Bitcoin projects potentially considering similar moves.
Long-time Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) Core contributor Matt Corallo has called on Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub after the Rust Lightning development project was permanently banned without explanation, raising fresh concerns about relying on a single code hosting platform.
Corallo said the issue began after GitHub incorrectly flagged a contributor, leaving the project without continuous integration services before the entire open-source project was reportedly banned despite repeated attempts to resolve the matter through Microsoft account managers.
The contributor identified as Luis Schwab said his GitHub account had been mistakenly banned twice within a week, while other developers, including Roman Storm, shared similar experiences of losing access to their accounts without what they described as an effective appeals process.
Corallo argued that the rapid growth of AI-generated coding projects and automated activity has increased pressure on GitHub's moderation systems, with the platform now hosting more than 420 million repositories and over four million organisations worldwide following Microsoft's acquisition in 2018.
Senior Bitcoin Core contributor Andrew Poelstra also criticised GitHub, claiming recent platform issues disrupted pull request tracking and code merging, making it harder for developers to maintain software projects securely and efficiently.
Corallo confirmed that the rust-bitcoin project has already started migrating to its own self-hosted repository at git.rust-bitcoin.org, while Rust Lightning is expected to follow as developers evaluate alternatives such as Forgejo.
GitHub has hosted Bitcoin Core and many of the ecosystem's leading open-source projects for more than a decade, but the latest dispute has prompted renewed discussion about whether critical Bitcoin infrastructure should instead operate on independently managed development platforms.
At the time of reporting, Bitcoin price was $59,767.15.
