According to data provided by Coin Metrics, there are an additional 2.04 million Bitcoin Private (BTCP) coins that were covertly premined. Coin Metrics is a company that provides virtual currency analysis. The information was released on December 23 by the crypto firm. The potential for backlash here is strong and could derail future plans by the BTCP project.

Don’t Trust, Verify

In what Coin Metrics calls a case study, they have discovered that there are an additional 2.04 million additional BTCP units minted. These coins were additionally minted during the import of the Bitcoin UTXOs and sent to the BTCP shielded pool. This has increased the supply of the virtual currency to 22.6 million.

This has had a very negative impact on the BTCP project. Indeed, this clearly contradicts what the BTCP team has been saying about the project and the BTCP blockchain. At the moment, the funds were moved to different exchanges.

The report reads as follows:

“Ultimately the lack of uptake of BTCP by the recipients of the airdrop meant that those additional 300k transparent units today represent close to 10% of the BTC supply in circulation with 1.80M covertly mined units remaining in the shielded pool.”

There are now two options for BTCP team if they want to solve this issue. The first one will be to hard fork the Bitcoin Private network and remove all shielded coins from existence. The second option would be to remove all unmoved coins, also performing a hard fork.

The first option would remove around 1.7 or 1.8 million illegitimate coins from circulation. The second option would eliminate 12 million BTCP coins from circulation. However, this last option, would not remove the illegitimate coins.

Now the BTCP community needs to debate how to solve this issue and generate a consensus about what to do with this. At the moment, developers are already working in the first solution.

Bitcoin Private is a hard fork of Bitcoin (BTC) and ZClassic (ZCL). Bitcoin Private has a supply of around 20.4 million BTCP. The virtual currency was launched to the market back at the beginning of the current year.

At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin Private is the 92nd largest virtual currency in the market. It has a market capitalization of $36.76 million and each coin can be purchased for $1.79.

There are other virtual currencies that have also been audited in order to find vulnerabilities and other issues. Some of these coins are NEO and NANO, among others.