The number of bitcoin wallet addresses that hold more than one Satoshi has already surpassed 40 million.
The smallest unit of the transaction recorded on the blockchain is one Satoshi, which is equal to 0.00000001 BTC.
The majority of the addresses with significant growth in 2021 have a maximum of 0.01 BTC.
Over the years, the bitcoin halving mechanism has had a significant impact on the price of BTC. For validating transactions, bitcoin miners receive progressively less BTC as a block reward. The incentives began at 50 bitcoins for every validated block, halving every 210,000 blocks solved.
From 12.5 BTC on July 9, 2016, to 6.25 BTC on May 11, 2020, the number of bitcoins given per block was half. Because mining is so expensive, BTC must maintain its value while fewer incentives are distributed per block.
Adding up the numbers
Around 20 million addresses now hold at least 0.001 BTC, up roughly 100% from 11.5 million addresses that owned the same amount in 2019.
When compared to the previous year, the number of addresses owning up to 10 BTC increased by 100,000.
A maximum of 0.01 BTC is presently held by nearly 10 million addresses. Since 2020, the number of addresses has increased by 34%, from 7,305,539 to 9,848,972, nearly doubling from 5,530,858 in 2019.
It’s tempting to conclude that the increase of addresses holding up to 0.01 BTC is primarily due to individual investors, based on these figures.
Big organizations and affluent institutional investors are unlikely to deal with private keys, outsourcing that burden to centralized exchanges, therefore the addresses that own at least 10,000 BTC are presumably custodial wallets.
The macro shot
A user can have many addresses, sometimes to improve security when transacting, therefore an address does not equal a user.
So be cautious when trying to deduce meaning from these figures. Overall, BTC holdings have grown.
Addresses cannot tell us who is causing the surge, but forensic techniques can correlate addresses to certain actions.
Companies like Elliptic and Chainalysis help criminal investigations by tracking BTC as it moves via wallets, exchanges, and other channels.
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