Overview
- Glassnode analysis shows about 6.26 million BTC, or roughly 31.2% of circulating supply, have public keys visible on the blockchain, a level not seen since around 2016.
- Address reuse accounts for roughly 4.33 million BTC while structural output types such as legacy pay-to-public-key and Taproot add about 1.94 million BTC to the total.
- Exchanges hold about 1.79 million BTC with visible keys and added roughly 123,000 BTC to exposed reserves since May, with platform exposure rates ranging from around 2% to nearly 100%.
- On Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, Glassnode co‑founder Rafael Schultze‑Kraft published the updated figures and researchers including Justin Drake urged custodians to prepare for the possibility of faster cryptanalytic breakthroughs driven by AI.
- There is no known practical method today to derive private keys from visible public keys, but custodians can reduce operational exposure by migrating reserves to fresh addresses while migration is costly, complex, and cannot move coins controlled by lost or inactive keys.