Overview
- The draft proposal, formally designated on February 11, 2026, would identify addresses with exposed public keys, block new transfers to them and impose a roughly 160,000‑block delay before enforcement.
- Project Eleven has demonstrated a zero-knowledge recovery tool that lets owners prove seed-derived entitlement without revealing keys and runs in about 243 milliseconds on a laptop, but it only works for wallets using hierarchical derivation.
- On March 1, 2026, on-chain analysis reported that more than 34% of Bitcoin supply had public keys visible, meaning a large share of coins could be targeted in a future “harvest now, decrypt later” attack.
- No recovery code has been merged into Bitcoin Core and developers have not set an activation schedule, with some contributors urging caution and others arguing the proposal is an essential emergency backstop.
- If enacted, the plan would force exchanges, custodians and individual holders to migrate vulnerable keys over years and would leave pre-2012 outputs such as Satoshi’s roughly 1.1 million BTC effectively unrecoverable, raising governance and fairness trade-offs to watch.