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About 7.12 million BTC sits in addresses whose public keys are already visible on-chain, a potential target if quantum computers ever mature

Tue 10 Nov 2026 · 10:35 EST · 3 min read

In Technology

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About a third of all Bitcoin has its public keys out in the open, according to new data from Glassnode.

The on-chain analytics firm puts the figure at 35.4% of supply, or 7.12 million BTC, as of November 10, 2026. That is a large pile of coins sitting in a spot that could matter a great deal if quantum computing ever catches up to the hype.

What Glassnode found

The core finding is about visibility. Every Bitcoin wallet has a private key, which signs transactions, and a public key, which can be derived from it. Under the cryptography Bitcoin uses today, working backward from public key to private key is considered impractical.

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could, in theory, change that math. If that happens, any coin whose public key is already sitting on the blockchain becomes the low-hanging fruit.

Glassnode breaks the exposure into two main sources. Address reuse accounts for 25.8%, covering wallets where earlier transactions have already revealed the key. Balances held by exchanges account for 11.6%.

The trend line is also moving in one direction. Exposure stood at 24.8% in early 2021, then climbed to 30.2% by May 2026 and 31.2% by October 2026. The latest reading of 35.4% is the highest in that series.

Glassnode is not the only firm seeing this. Independent data from ChainQuery puts exposed supply at around 35.6% as of early November 2026, close enough to Glassnode’s reading to suggest the figure is not a quirk of one firm’s methodology.

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The older coins and the newer format

Some of the exposure is baked into Bitcoin’s history rather than caused by user habits. Legacy P2PK outputs, an early transaction format that records the public key directly, hold approximately 1.71 million BTC.

A significant share of those coins is attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator is not expected to log in and move them to a safer address anytime soon, which makes that stash a permanent fixture of the exposure count.

Taproot, a much newer output type, is part of the picture too. Taproot outputs hold around 222,000 BTC and may carry structural characteristics that expose keys. The research adds that these coins are not at immediate risk without active efforts to discover the corresponding private keys.

No quantum emergency, yet

Quantum computers capable of breaking Bitcoin’s current encryption standards do not exist today.

There is also no settled timeline for when, or whether, such machines will arrive. The risk Glassnode is measuring is about what is sitting in the blast radius if the threat materializes, not a countdown to a known attack date.

Glassnode co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft pointed to a straightforward fix for the largest bucket: moving coins from reused addresses to freshly generated ones eliminates the exposure tied to reuse. The firm frames hashed, never-used addresses as a meaningful way to cut down on risk.

What this means

For individual holders, the practical takeaway is narrow but real. If you have been reusing the same receiving address for years, your coins are part of that 25.8%, and moving them to a fresh address addresses that specific risk.

The bigger issue is at the protocol level. Address reuse can be solved one user at a time, but the 1.71 million BTC in P2PK outputs cannot, especially the portion linked to Satoshi. Any eventual migration to post-quantum cryptography would have to reckon with coins whose owners may never act.

The rising exposure numbers also put a clock in the background of that debate, even without a fixed deadline. The share of visible keys has climbed from 24.8% in early 2021 to 35.4% today.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

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