On February 22, 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto sent what would be his final email in the Malmi archive. The raw header shows both Gavin Andresen and Martti Malmi in the To: field on the “0.3.20 release : shipped” thread, but the body itself is a reply to Gavin — Satoshi addresses Gavin in the second person (“Martti should give you the Drupal admin password”) and refers to Martti in the third person, looping him in so he knows to perform the handoff Satoshi is delegating. Gavin had asked Satoshi for permission (or the encrypted password) to post release announcements to the SourceForge bitcoin-list mailing list. Satoshi’s reply transferred that responsibility:
Martti should give you the Drupal admin password.
Any subscriber can post to bitcoin-list. Here’s the admin password in case you need it later.
The body then carried two PGP-encrypted blocks — the bitcoin-list mailman admin password, encrypted separately to Gavin’s and Martti’s public keys. With that handoff, another piece of project infrastructure passed from Satoshi to the remaining maintainers.
This was among the last known communications from Satoshi before his complete withdrawal from public involvement in Bitcoin. Approximately two months later, Satoshi wrote to Mike Hearn on April 23, 2011: “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.” Three days after that, on April 26, 2011, Satoshi sent what is believed to be his absolute final email — to Gavin Andresen — transferring the network alert key and writing: “I’ve moved on to other things and will probably be unavailable.”
The Satoshi-Malmi correspondence, spanning from May 2009 to February 2011, encompasses approximately 260 emails and represents one of the most extensive records of direct communication with Bitcoin’s creator. The correspondence covers nearly the entire period of Satoshi’s active involvement with Bitcoin, from the early days when there were only a handful of users to the point where the project had grown into a functioning open-source community with multiple developers.
Malmi kept these emails private for over a decade, explaining in 2024 that he “did not feel comfortable sharing private correspondence earlier” but decided to publish them for the COPA v. Wright trial in the UK where he served as a witness. The full archive was published on GitHub on February 23, 2024.