Over 6 Million Bitcoin Sit Behind Exposed Public Keys, Glassnode Co-Founder Says
Fresh figures from a Glassnode co-founder put more than 6 million BTC in outputs whose public keys are already visible, as Justin Drake urges crypto to prepare for AI-era threats to wallet cryptograph
A co-founder of on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has published figures indicating that more than 6 million bitcoin sit in outputs whose public keys have already been exposed on the blockchain. That represents roughly 30% of bitcoin's 21 million maximum supply.
Public keys become visible in several common situations: coins held in early pay-to-public-key outputs, addresses that have been reused for multiple transactions, and certain script types that reveal key material when spent. Once a public key is on-chain, it remains permanently visible to anyone reading the ledger.
AI and cryptography warnings
The figures circulated alongside comments from Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, who has urged the industry to prepare for the possibility that advances in artificial intelligence could be turned against wallet cryptography. His argument is precautionary: exposed keys narrow the margin for error if the underlying cryptography is ever weakened.
- Exposed public keys are considered a longer-term risk because they remove one layer of protection for affected coins
- Bitcoin's standard defence has been that deriving a private key from a public key is computationally impractical today
- Wallet designers and researchers have proposed migration paths and post-quantum signature schemes as longer-term mitigations
There is no indication that any such attack is currently feasible or underway, and no funds are known to have been lost to it. The discussion is part of a broader, ongoing debate about how bitcoin should handle cryptographic risk over the coming decades.