Over 6.26M BTC Now Have Publicly Exposed Keys — 31.2% of Supply, Glassnode Co-Founder Says
TREE NEWS reports: Roughly 6.26 million bitcoin — about 31.2% of the current circulating supply — sits in addresses whose public keys have already been revealed on-chain. The figure has climbed from 24.8% in early 2021, underscoring how much of Bitcoin’s supply is now cryptographically “visible” to anyone who cares to look.
Schultze-Kraft breaks the total into two buckets: about 4.33 million BTC exposed through address reuse, and roughly 1.94 million BTC tied to script types that inherently publish keys. He was careful to note that the statistic does not mean a quantum attack is currently feasible, nor can it be used to gauge the security posture of exchanges or custodians.
Why Public Keys Matter
In Bitcoin’s design, funds are locked to a hash of a public key (the address). Spending requires revealing the full public key and a signature. As long as the key stays hidden, a would-be quantum attacker has nothing to target. But once coins are spent — or an address is reused — the public key becomes permanently visible on-chain, and the address’s security model shifts from “hash-protected” to “key-exposed.”
- Address reuse (~4.33M BTC): Users and services sending to the same address repeatedly, a practice long discouraged but still widespread among exchanges, miners and legacy wallets.
- Script types (~1.94M BTC): Certain output scripts (such as early P2PK outputs) publish keys by construction, including many coins mined in Bitcoin’s first years.
What This Does — and Doesn’t — Mean
The number is best read as a measure of exposure surface, not imminent risk. Cryptographically relevant quantum computers capable of breaking secp256k1 elliptic-curve signatures do not exist today, and the timeline for their arrival remains fiercely debated. Schultze-Kraft’s caveat is important: an exposed key is a necessary precondition for a quantum theft scenario, not a sufficient one.
Still, the trend line deserves attention. A rise from roughly one-quarter to nearly one-third of supply in under five years reflects structural habits — exchange cold-wallet consolidation, miner payout addresses, and old coins moving — that are difficult to reverse. Each reused address adds another key to the pile.
The Road Ahead
The Bitcoin community has begun discussing post-quantum migration paths, including new address types with quantum-resistant signatures and voluntary migration incentives. But any transition would be a multi-year, consensus-level undertaking, and millions of dormant coins — including those attributed to Satoshi-era wallets — may never move at all.
For now, the practical takeaway is less about doomsday scenarios and more about hygiene: avoiding address reuse, adopting modern script types, and tracking exposure metrics as a long-term risk indicator. The quantum clock may not be ticking loudly yet, but the industry is quietly counting how many locks are already visible.
