Pay to public key

P2PK

The first payment. The lock holds the public key itself, and only that key can spend it.

What it is

A P2PK output locks sats to a whole public key, with no hash in between. To spend it, the owner signs the spending transaction with that key. It has no address of its own, though tools often show the P2PKH address of the same key.

Script pattern

  1. <public key> The owner's key: 65 bytes uncompressed, or 33 compressed.
  2. OP_CHECKSIG Checks the spender's signature against the key.

67 or 35 bytes in all.

How it is spent

A signature from the key in the lock: <signature>.

Background

P2PK is the oldest payment on chain: the genesis coinbase and the coinbases of Bitcoin's first years pay this way. P2PKH took over as the standard, because a hash is shorter to share and keeps the key private until the first spend.

First seen and adoption

First seen in block 1, on 2009-01-09. Its first transaction is 0e3e2357e806b6cdb1f70b54c3a3a17b6714ee1f0e68bebb44a74b1efd512098.

Counts cover blocks 0 to 169755, every one verified complete and typed; the highest block we know is 974915. Blocks 169756 to 312906 are complete and not typed yet. A transaction with several types counts once under each. First seen means first seen in that range.

Transactions of this type per 10,000 blocks
From block Transactions
0 10,054
10,000 10,023
20,000 10,032
30,000 10,041
40,000 10,112
50,000 10,819
60,000 10,745
70,000 10,342
80,000 10,082
90,000 10,027
100,000 10,030
110,000 10,031
120,000 10,061
130,000 10,055
140,000 10,017
150,000 65,914
160,000 47,925

On chain

The latest transactions of this type in the blocks we have typed. Transaction pages need sign-in.

Specification