Over 6M BTC Sit Behind Exposed Public Keys as AI Risk Warnings Grow
Figures shared by a Glassnode co-founder point to more than 6 million bitcoin in outputs with visible public keys, as Justin Drake urges prep for AI-era cryptographic attacks.
More than 6 million bitcoin are held in outputs whose public keys are already visible on-chain, according to figures shared by a Glassnode co-founder. The number is a measure of how much of the supply sits in configurations where the cryptographic key tied to the coins is publicly recorded rather than hidden behind an address hash.
The figures circulated alongside a warning from Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, who urged the industry to prepare for the possibility of AI-assisted attacks on wallet cryptography. His message centred on readiness rather than describing an imminent or active threat.
Why key exposure matters
Most bitcoin addresses reveal only a hash of the public key while coins are unspent. Once a transaction is signed with that address, or in older output types that commit to the public key directly, the key itself is written to the blockchain, where it remains permanently visible. Security researchers have argued that such exposed keys are the most direct target for any future machine capable of solving the elliptic-curve problem underlying current wallet signatures.
No timeline has been attached to any such attack, and hardware capable of breaking today's wallet cryptography is not known to exist publicly. The discussion adds to a broader effort among developers to evaluate post-quantum signature schemes and migration paths for coins held in older, more exposed output types.