Satoshi hands over the Bitcoin alert key to Gavin Andresen (April 26, 2011)

On April 26, 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto sent what would become his last known private email. Addressed to Gavin Andresen with the subject line “alert key,” it handed over the network alert key and announced his departure.

I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them.

He then announced his departure:

I’ve moved on to other things and will probably be unavailable.

Finally, he transferred the critical network alert key:

Here’s the CAlert key and broadcast code in case you need it. You should probably give it to at least one or two other people. There are a few long time users who are always around all the time.

The CAlert key was a powerful tool that enabled its holder to broadcast emergency messages to all Bitcoin clients on the network, warning of critical security issues or required upgrades. By transferring this key, Satoshi was completing the final piece of the leadership handover. Satoshi never replied to Andresen’s subsequent response.

This handover sits inside a tightly clustered final-week corpus: Andresen’s reply on the same day (Andresen → Satoshi on the CIA visit), Satoshi’s final known email to Martti Malmi two months earlier handing over the bitcoin-list mailman password, and the Forbes crypto-currency story days before that arguably accelerated the withdrawal. The Gavin Andresen biography tracks Andresen’s lead-maintainer arc through this handover. The post-2011 identification corpus — the Satoshi self-statements inventory, the Sassaman identity hypothesis, and the broader public-disappearance frame represented by the final-known-email entry — all treat this email as the documented departure point.