Glassnode data shows that 4.12 million bitcoins (BTC) are held in quantitatively exposed addresses due to address reuse, partial spending, and custody practices, more than double the 1.92 million BTC exposed by legacy Bitcoin script types.
The on-chain company divides Bitcoin’s quantum exposed supply into structural risks arising from the design of the protocol and the disclosure of public keys, and operational risks arising from how holders manage their addresses and outputs.
Why structural and operational exposure are not the same thing
The structured exposure covers the outputs where the public key appears on-chain by default. The suite includes an early public key payment (P2PK) service. Satoshi coins era, bare multisig outputs and push-to-wire outputs to the modern Taproot (P2TR).
Operational exposure works differently. Address types such as Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) and Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) hide public keys behind a hash when inactive. However, once the owner reuses the title Or partially spent, This protection no longer applies to any remaining balance.
Glassnode estimates the two coins account for 30.2% of all bitcoins issued combined. Together, these results show that the operational share is 2.1 times larger than the structural share.
“The key takeaway is that most of today’s sleep exposures aren’t just a legacy text design issue — they’re a key and address management issue,” the company said.
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It shows the behavior of the on-chain wallet
The report revealed that exchanges constitute the largest identifiable subset of operationally exposed Bitcoin. They have about 1.66 million Bitcoins, which is approximately 40% of the total amount.
“It also appears high in relative terms: nearly half of the Bitcoin held on the exchange is in the sensitive pool, compared to less than 30% of non-exchange supply,” Glassnode said.
Exposure varies sharply between trustees. Glass knot signs Coinbase balances in 5% exposed. Meanwhile, Binance’s share is around 85% and Bitfinex’s at 100%.
Other Bitcoin holding entities also differ. The Tree of Wisdom is shown completely exposed. Grayscale reserves about half of its supply in the exposed output. However, the sovereign portfolios of the United States and the United Kingdom, El Salvador shows zero exposure.
Glassnode reports that exchange-owned bitcoin has gone from about 55% operationally secure in 2018 to about 45% today.
Bitcoin 360 Improvement Proposal (BIP-360) That would harden the rootstock. However, a significant portion of the operational bucket can be reduced today by rotating addresses and avoiding reuse, without any change to the consensus.
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this post Glassnode found that 20% of Bitcoin Quantum is exposed through behavior, not code appeared first on BeInCrypto.
