Lead Monero maintainer to step down after five years

Lead Monero maintainer Riccardo Spagni, AKA ‘Fluffypony’, has announced he will be stepping down from the role and passing the responsibility on to fellow core team member ‘Snipa’.

Spagni has been the lead maintainer of the Monero protocol for over five years since its creation.

Monero, originally created in 2014, is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency which focuses on privacy and decentralisation. The blockchain provides untraceable transactions and has long been in the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation.

Spagni has also stepped down from other community roles in the past, including lead maintainer for the Monero website.

He will continue to offer assistance to Snipa as and when required, and will continue to be active in the protocol as a back-up maintainer.

The Monero core team shared:

“Snipa is a longtime contributor to Monero. He is best known for developing a popular piece of Monero pool software and supporting the network with well-connected nodes. He has substantial coding and auditing experience, and a desire to better Monero’s processes.”

The Monero protocol is open source, and therefore its maintenance is handled by the community and its dedicated core team of developers.

In mid-November, Monero’s CLI binaries were compromised in an attack on the ‘germonero.org’ website, which took members of the Monero community just a few minutes to spot and rectify.

This community-led approach has worked well for Monero, which doesn’t have an official foundation for its governance yet still maintains the protocol to a high standard.

Fluffypony’s new focus

Spagni will now be focusing his attention on other projects directly related to Monero, including the Tari project, which is a sidechain of Monero dedicated to crypto collectibles.

Spagni also plays an active role in organising the Magical Crypto Friends conference held in New York.

The conference, which had more than 1,200 attendees last year, is a tongue-in-cheek animal-themed conference which mixes serious crypto discussion with cartoon critters.

Spagni hopes that his new projects will also bring indirect benefits to the Monero network.