Report: Under 20,000 Addresses Hold More Than 60% of Bitcoin's Supply
Sani, co‑founder of Time Chain Index, a bitcoin onchain metrics platform, studied the bitcoin address dataset to estimate the number of network users. He found fewer than 20,000 addresses hold over 60% of the supply, while about 3.9 million active users hold the remainder.
Report: Bitcoin Is Highly Concentrated, Users Likely Under 4 Million
While bitcoin has recently gained mainstream attention, largely due to the actions of the Trump Administration and its rise as a corporate treasury asset, it still has a long way to go. Sani, founder of the onchain metrics analysis platform Time Chain Index, recently inspected the blockchain to determine the number of users who own the majority of bitcoin.
Taking a snapshot of the addresses in the network on September 26, Sani found that as it stands today, the BTC supply remains highly concentrated, with 60% of the supply in control of 18,695 whale addresses. “This confirms that raw address counts vastly overestimate actual users, since many addresses are either dust, pooled wallets, or custodial,” he assessed.
Of the over 54 million addresses scrutinized, 271,883 were found to be controlled by so-called entities, including companies, miners, custodians, exchanges, and exchange-traded fund (ETFs) providers. These pooled addresses hold 8,789,113 BTC, nearly 44% of all the bitcoin supply.
Removing these pooled addresses and eliminating addresses containing dust (marginal BTC numbers) to try to find the real number of users participating in the network leaves only a little more than 23.4 million addresses, controlling 11,131,336.93 BTC.
Sani stated:
Assuming an average of 6 addresses per user, the Bitcoin network likely has ~3.9 million active users controlling most BTC outside custodial pools.
He clarified that these numbers are based on an assumption, given that the 23.4 million addresses obtained don’t represent unique active users, as most people hold multiple addresses.
Finally, Sani warns that using raw address count numbers to estimate the real number of users of the Bitcoin blockchain can be misleading. “Careful filtering and clustering reveal the true scale of the network,” he concluded.