Bitcoin BTC

No issuing or controlling organization exists and no company or foundation sold the coin. The creator published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto (whitepaper lists only that name and an email, no institutional affiliation). The software is developed in the open as Bitcoin Core; no issuer team is behind the token.

No company, foundation or other legal entity issues or controls Bitcoin; the whitepaper states there is 'no central authority to issue' coins.

Quarkslab (three engineers) audited Bitcoin Core's peer-to-peer interface and affected components (mempool, block validation, transaction evaluation, chain state, peer management), May-Sept 2025, managed by OSTIF with support from Brink and Chaincode Labs. 16 findings: 2 low, 14 informational, none critical/high/medium. Scope was the P2P layer only, not the whole codebase.

No issuer, foundation, admin key, mint function or freeze function appears in the protocol as described in the whitepaper and the Bitcoin Wiki: supply follows a fixed halving schedule (cap slightly under 21 million) enforced by consensus rules that every node validates. Rule changes require node operators to run new software. No privileged key was found; this is a reading of the protocol documents, not an on-chain key audit.

No unlock schedule or vesting; new coins are issued only as the block subsidy, currently 3.125 BTC per block (since the April 2024 halving). At the 10-minute target interval (52,560 blocks/year) that is about 164,250 BTC, i.e. about 0.82% of the 20,094,946 total supply (CoinGecko). The next halving (block 1,050,000) is not expected within 12 months. Actual block timing varies, so this is the schedule-based figure.

Transaction fees are visible on-chain and on DefiLlama (about 76.6M USD over the trailing year). They accrue to miners; there is no protocol or issuer revenue (DefiLlama revenue = 0).

DefiLlama 1-year total of on-chain transaction fees (paid to miners). DefiLlama reports protocol revenue as 0 for Bitcoin (no issuer or protocol treasury receives fees). Fees figure is DefiLlama's trailing total1y, read 2026-10-07.

Sum of the ten largest addresses as listed by BitInfoCharts on 2026-10-07 (percentages 1.24, 0.8493, 0.7011, 0.6471, 0.4825, 0.4711, 0.4572, 0.3980, 0.3898, 0.3748), my own sum of the table. INCLUDES exchange/custody addresses: Binance cold wallets (2), Robinhood, Bitfinex (2, one labeled hack-recovery), Tether, plus labeled MtGox-hack and 'Mr.100' addresses and 2 unlabeled. Address-level figures, not individual holders. One earlier read of the same page showed address #2 at 229,835 BTC instead of 170,630 (which would give about 6.6%), so the figure moves between page loads.