35.4% of Bitcoin Supply Now Has Public Keys Exposed On-Chain

Roughly 7.12 million BTC — 35.4% of all Bitcoin supply — sits in addresses whose public keys are already visible on-chain, according to on-chain analytics firm Glassnode, as of November 10, 2026. The figure marks the highest exposure level in the firm's data series and frames a growing question about what happens if quantum computers ever mature enough to break Bitcoin's current cryptography.

What did Glassnode actually measure?

Every Bitcoin wallet pairs a private key, which signs transactions, with a public key derived from it. Under the elliptic-curve cryptography Bitcoin uses today, reversing that derivation is considered impractical. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could, in theory, change the math — and any coin whose public key is already recorded on the blockchain becomes the first target.

Glassnode splits the 35.4% into two main sources:

• Address reuse: 25.8% of supply, covering wallets where earlier transactions have already revealed the public key.
• Exchange-held balances: 11.6%.

The trend points one direction. Exposure stood at 24.8% in early 2021, climbed to 30.2% by May 2026 and reached 31.2% by October 2026 before hitting the current 35.4% record.

Independent data from ChainQuery puts exposed supply at roughly 35.6% as of early November 2026 — close enough to Glassnode's reading to suggest the number isn't an artifact of one firm's methodology.

Why can't the oldest coins be fixed?

Some of the exposure is baked into Bitcoin's early design rather than user behavior. Legacy P2PK outputs — a transaction format from Bitcoin's first years 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. Since Satoshi isn't expected to move them to a safer output type, that stash is effectively a permanent fixture of the exposure count.

Taproot plays a role too. Taproot outputs hold around 222,000 BTC and may carry structural characteristics that expose keys, the research found. Glassnode notes these coins face no immediate risk absent active efforts to discover the corresponding private keys.

Is there a quantum threat today?

No. Quantum computers capable of breaking Bitcoin's encryption standards do not exist, and there's no settled timeline for when — or whether — such machines arrive. What Glassnode is measuring is the size of 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 risk.

What does this mean for holders and the protocol?

For individuals, the takeaway is narrow but concrete. Anyone who has reused the same receiving address for years is part of that 25.8%, and a single transfer to a fresh address removes that specific exposure.

The protocol-level problem is harder. Address reuse can be solved one holder 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 numbers put a clock behind that debate even without a fixed deadline. Visible-key share has climbed from 24.8% in early 2021 to 35.4% today, and each new year of address reuse adds to the pile that a future quantum-capable attacker would target first.