With the release of Core Lightning 26.06 “Quantam-Resistant Lightning Channel”, including bwatch, a major architectural contribution co-designed by Sangbida Chauhuri and Rusty Russell, an era comes to a close.
When Rusty Russell made his first commit on May 26, 2015, it carried the humble description:
"Initial silly cmdline util to create an openchannel packet."
Over the next eleven years, that small experiment became one of the world's leading Lightning implementations.
The numbers are difficult to comprehend.
Rusty authored 9,762 commits to Core Lightning.
Out of 18,098 total commits in the repository's history, 53.9% were written by him.
He reached a peak of 1,316 commits in 2018 and sustained an average of roughly 900 commits per year for nearly a decade. Even in 2026, he had already contributed 458 commits before stepping away.
His work spans every corner of the project:
- 1,212 commits to lightningd
- 891 commits to the test framework
- 544 commits to gossipd
- Hundreds more across channeld, connectd, wallet, routing, documentation, and infrastructure
What stands out most is not just the volume, but the precision.
Across nearly ten thousand commits, there were only 18 reverts.
...read more at blog.blockstream.com
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Respect for Rusty!
I remember back in early 2019 I was playing around with a CLN node and crash it.
I contacted Rusty and very professionally and patiently helped me recover a lost channel. He also found a bug from our discussion, that later was fixed.
Legendary! Thanks Rusty
Commit means a going from bug fix to another doesn't means that you are earning something or something new final release may be each 30 commits
Rusty is a bloody legend. Thank you for all your work on Lightning and looking forward to seeing your next adventure!
Incredible dedication. 11 years and nearly 10,000 commits is an amazing achievement. Huge respect to Rusty for everything he built for the Lightning Network!