Monero Core Team

The Monero Core Team is a rotating group of experienced developers and researchers responsible for maintaining the Monero codebase, coordinating hard fork schedules, and stewarding the protocol's technical direction. Unlike many blockchain projects, Monero has no formal corporate entity — governance operates through consensus among Core Team members, community contributors, and the Community Crowdfunding System (CCS) that funds development work. The team oversees release engineering, including the twice-yearly scheduled hard forks that Monero uses to deploy privacy improvements and protocol upgrades without contentious splits. Core responsibilities include reviewing pull requests, coordinating external security audits, maintaining the reference implementation (monero-project/monero), and communicating changes to exchanges, wallets, and infrastructure operators. Key technical decisions made by the core team — such as ring signature size parameters, bulletproof adoption, RingCT implementation, and Dandelion++ networking — have had direct effects on transaction size, verification speed, and the privacy assurances Monero provides to users and traders. The team also coordinates with Monero Research Lab (MRL) on incorporating academic cryptography research into production code, maintains the Community Crowdfunding System for funding contributors, and manages relationships with exchange and wallet integrators required to upgrade with each hard fork.