A co-founder of on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has counted 6.26 million bitcoin (BTC) with exposed public keys, according to a report published by COINOTAG on October 9, 2026.

The tally — equivalent to just under 30% of bitcoin's fixed 21 million supply cap — has fed into an ongoing debate over whether advances in artificial intelligence could eventually compromise the cryptography that secures bitcoin.

Public-key exposure is a long-discussed technical property of the Bitcoin network. Spending is authorized through elliptic-curve digital signatures — chiefly the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) over the secp256k1 curve, whose security rests on the presumed intractability of deriving a private key from a public key. While many address formats conceal the underlying public key until coins are moved from an address, some legacy transaction outputs — including early pay-to-public-key (P2PK) outputs from Bitcoin's earliest years, which predate the pay-to-public-key-hash format that later became the network standard — display the key openly on-chain. Coins held in such outputs are widely regarded as theoretically more exposed in any scenario in which those signatures could be broken. No publicly documented method currently enables AI systems to derive private keys from exposed public keys; the concerns in this debate center on possible future advances rather than demonstrated breakthroughs.

Update 09:18 UTC: Arthur Hayes, the CEO of Flop Labs and investment director at Maelstrom, entered the debate on October 8, arguing that fears about artificial intelligence breaking encryption amount to FUD and should not derail the bull case. Hayes is also widely known as the co-founder and former chief executive of crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX.

This content was first published on COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/glassnode-626m-bitcoin-exposed-public-keys