The number of active entities holding Bitcoin is continuously growing over the years to the current number of over 23 million, according to a recent report.
Cryptocurrency exchanges control 13% of all bitcoins, and Coinbase is the leader with the most considerable stash.
The popular blockchain monitoring resource, Glassnode, recently published its new paper regarding Bitcoin holdings. To gather the information, it used “standard heuristics, proprietary clustering algorithms, and advanced data science methods on top of raw on-chain data.”
It also excludes a single address holding funds of multiple users, and therefore, the final results show the number of entities, instead of users or individuals.
23 Million Entities Hold Bitcoin
The report finds that, as of January 2020, the total number of entities holding Bitcoin is approximately 23.1 million. Naturally, since one user can have more than one address, the number of non-zero BTC addresses is significantly higher at 28.4 million.
Active Bitcoin Addresses. Source: Glassnode
The paper also indicates that the increases in the number of entities are monotonous, without sharp spikes, which is a signal that pertains to a more mature market. On the contrary, the number of addresses exploded during the parabolic price increase of 2017/2018. However, shortly after the Bitcoin bubble burst, people were as eager to leave as they were to initially open new addresses, as one can see in the graphic below.
Active Bitcoin Addresses. Source: Glassnode
Additionally, the report states that the daily net growth of entities is consistently positive:
“In Bitcoin’s history, there have been only 21 days so far in which the net entity growth was negative.”
Who Holds The Most Bitcoins?
Expectedly, exchanges hold the most significant stashes of bitcoins, the report continues.
Seven of them have over 100,000 bitcoins. The U.S.-based Coinbase leads by a country mile with 983,800 BTC. Huobi, founded in China but later moved to Singapore, is next with 369,100 BTC.
The largest exchange by trading volume, Binance, is third with 240,700 BTC, followed by Bitfinex (214,600 BTC), Bitstamp (165,400 BTC), Kraken (132,100 BTC), and Bittrex (118,100 BTC).
Interestingly enough, all of those exchanges keep over 2.3 million (around 13%) of all circulating Bitcoin supply.
Excluding exchanges, the report also estimates that the number of whales that hold over 1,000 bitcoins is around 1,900.
The post appeared first on CryptoPotato
