Bitcoin Wallet Addresses and Holdings
An overview of the number of Bitcoin wallet addresses and the holdings of the wallets.
The number of Blockchain wallet has steadily risen and reached a count of over 42 million wallets by the end of September 2019. In 2016 the number of addresses has been 9 million, which implies a growth of 155% per year.
However, it is difficult to translate the number of wallets to the number of users because a common feature of Bitcoin wallets applications is that they generate several addresses for one user. Additionally, it is complicated to take into account the number of users who use a wallet from crypto exchanges.
More interesting is the distribution of the number of Bitcoins each wallet holds. While most of the wallets hold between USD 1 and USD 1000, the number of wallets with large Bitcoin holdings has steadily risen since the end of 2018. This indicates that high net worth individuals accumulated a lot of Bitcoins while the price has been around USD 4000 per Bitcoin. This is often interpreted as a long term bullish indicator.
Keep in mind that the in segment with over 1000 BTC per wallet are also some cold storage wallets from crypto exchanges. And worth mentioning is that most of the wallets from the group “lost Bitcoins” is represented in this segment as well.
A study from Delphi Digital has analyzed the „Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO)” Data and the result was, that up to 4 million Bitcoins may have been lost. The Wallet from Satoshi Nakamoto with 980’000 Bitcoins counts to this group as well.
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