Glassnode Co-Founder Counts 6.26M Bitcoin (BTC) With Exposed Public Keys

6.26 Million Coins With Public Keys Visible

Rafael Schultze-Kraft, co-founder of the on-chain analytics firm Glassnode, published a count on October 8 showing that 6.26 million Bitcoin (BTC), 31.2% of the total supply, now have public keys directly visible on the blockchain. In the address formats most wallets use today, a public key stays hidden behind a hash until the address sends its first transaction; from that moment the key sits on-chain in plain form. A sufficiently large quantum computer could in principle reverse-engineer a private key from an exposed public key, which makes spent-from addresses the relevant attack surface, and the debate over Bitcoin supply security has turned on exactly this exposure. Key exposure, once recorded, cannot be undone on the same address; only a transfer to a new address removes it.

The share has climbed steadily. Glassnode put the exposed total at 6.04 million coins, 30.2% of supply, in a May report, so roughly 220,000 more coins crossed the threshold in about five months. The current ratio returns the network to levels last seen in 2016 and stands well above the 24.8% recorded in early 2021.

Schultze-Kraft posted a day after Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake called on the industry to begin planning what he described as “bunker mode”: a deliberate, large-scale migration of coins into new addresses whose public keys remain hash-protected. Drake's call, made on October 7, asks individuals to schedule transfers in bulk rather than wait for a crisis. The two statements do not carry the same weight. Drake urges holders to act; Schultze-Kraft measures how many coins would have to move if they did, setting the minimum migration at the 6.26 million he counted. No rebuttal to the migration call has been issued so far.

4.33 Million From Address Reuse

Most of the exposed total comes from habits rather than from old formats. Of the 6.26 million coins, 4.33 million sit in addresses that have been reused after a first send, which means their keys went public the moment an earlier transaction left them. Moving those balances to fresh, hash-protected addresses clears the exposure entirely. The remaining 1.94 million are locked into script formats that reveal the public key by design. Pay-to-public-key outputs from the network's earliest era account for 1.71 million coins, and 1.1 million of those are attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, the largest single crypto whale stash and, unmoved since the earliest days, the original HODL. Taproot, introduced in 2021, adds another 222,000, and older multisig constructions complete the script-based bucket.

Custody practices put a further 1.79 million coins in the exposed column, all held by exchanges. The spread between venues is wide: Coinbase shows 10% of balances exposed, Binance 83% and Bitfinex 100%, with seven of the fifteen largest holders above 99%. Institutional custody, from ETF issuers to retail brokers, diverges just as sharply. Fidelity holds 375,000 Bitcoin (BTC) with only 2% exposed, and the government holdings of the United States, the United Kingdom and El Salvador, the kind of coins a strategic Bitcoin reserve framework would cover, sit at 0%. Grayscale shows 49%, Revolut 99% and Robinhood 100%. Schultze-Kraft framed the percentages as a description of address usage, not a ranking of risk or a safety assessment of the venues named. Where coins sit across venues is a custody question our Best Crypto Exchanges comparison examines in detail.

The figures leave the practical dispute open. Drake's bunker-mode migration and Schultze-Kraft's count agree on the arithmetic but not on what follows from it: 4.33 million coins can be protected through ordinary key hygiene, while the 1.94 million in script formats, Satoshi's included, move only if their owners act. The measurement itself settles nothing about behavior. Whether holders treat 31.2% as an action list or a statistic, and whether exchanges showing 100% exposure re-architect their custody, is what would resolve the question, and nothing on the record so far does. Protocol-side privacy work continues in parallel, with the recently merged private broadcast fix in Bitcoin Core 32.x, though no quantum-driven migration program has been announced. The story is one of custody and key management rather than the Bitcoin price.