What happened
On 19 August 2026 the Bitcoin BIPs repository merged pull request 2215, moving BIP-351, Private Payments, to Closed and reclassifying its type as Specification. The proposal was assigned its number in July 2022 and had seen no activity since September of that year. Its own changelog now records "Moved to Closed due to lack of activity", dated 22 July 2026, the day the request was opened. It could not merge any sooner: BIP 3 gives authors four weeks to say they intend to keep working. One of BIP-351's two authors, Clark Moody, used the window to agree, writing "This is the correct path for this BIP."
What it changes
The status line is the entire change, so what matters is what it is a status line for.
BIP-351 attacked the problem every reusable address has: publish one, and anyone can see
every payment ever made to it. Instead of an address, a recipient would publish a static
payment code, a bech32m string beginning pay1 carrying a public key and two bytes of
address-type flags. A sender performs
elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman
against that key, and both sides independently derive the same fresh address for each
payment without either of them publishing it.
The hard part of any such scheme is how the recipient finds out a sender exists at all.
BIP-351's answer was a notification transaction: a 40-byte
OP_RETURN output holding the two ASCII bytes PP, a
four-byte notification code, the sender's 33-byte public key for that recipient, and one
byte naming the address type. The recipient looks for outputs beginning with the byte
sequence 106, 40, 80, 80 and does one multiplication per candidate to see whether the
notification is addressed to them.
That is a specific trade: one extra on-chain output the first time a given sender pays a given recipient, visible forever to everyone, bought in exchange for the recipient not having to test every transaction on the chain. Silent payments, BIP-352, took the other side of the same trade. Its abstract offers "static payment addresses in Bitcoin without on-chain linkability of payments or a need for on-chain notifications", and pays for that with the requirement that "wallets must scan the blockchain in order to detect payments". BIP-352 is at Complete status. BIP-351 is the version nobody built.
What it does not change
Closed is not rejected and not withdrawn. BIP 3 defines it as a proposal "of historical interest only, and is not being actively worked on, promoted or in active use". The document keeps its number and stays published, anyone is free to implement it, and the same process can move it back out if someone takes it up. Nothing in the closure says the design was wrong, only that nobody is advancing it, which is how the pull request puts it: the status "indicates that currently nobody is working on advancing this proposal".
No coin moved and no software changed. No wallet has to update, for the reason the proposal was closed in the first place: no Bitcoin project had adopted it.
And it does not settle the question underneath. A notification output costs block space and puts a permanent public marker on the moment two parties formed a paying relationship. Full-chain scanning costs the recipient bandwidth and processing instead, or costs them privacy if they hand the scanning to somebody else. Both bills are still real, and the closure of one proposal is not a demonstration that the other answer is the right one.
Context
This is the second BIP this month to reach Closed, by very different routes. BIP-110 got there after activating, splitting onto its own chain and stalling there. BIP-351 took four years and got there by silence, which is the ordinary way a proposal ends. The repository is a publication venue and an archive, so the status field is the only place that difference is recorded, and until this month it was recording nothing.