Latest public blockchain data gathered by analytics firm Glassnode indicates that retail investors hold about 17% of the entire circulating quantity of Bitcoin.
Will Clemente, an analyst at Reflexivity Research, tweeted in reaction to the numbers, “Not perfect yet, but solid for a 12-year-old asset and clearly going in the right way.” Bitcoin’s supply tends to spread out over time, whereas fiat currency holders tend to pool into large hoards.
Clemente’s Glassnode graph demonstrates that the proportion of Bitcoins held by ordinary investors has been rising steadily since 2011. Glassnode considers a user to be “retail” if their wallet has less than 10 BTC (now valued at almost $169,000).
This appears to be supported by data from IntoTheBlock, another blockchain analytics service. According to the company’s Bitcoin holding distribution website, 17.3 percent of all Bitcoins are held by addresses with between zero and ten Bitcoins.
It was less than 12% in early 2020, but by 2022, the rate of increase had accelerated dramatically. Retail buying of Bitcoin was also robust during the end of the bull market in early 2014 and at the start of the bear market in late 2017.
Previous work by Glassnode described “entities” as unique Bitcoin owners, which might include groups of blockchain addresses that are all associated with the same owner. During the “lifetime of Bitcoin,” it was discovered that 13.9% of the supply was held by organizations with less than 10 BTC in February 2021.
Many people have pointed out that the centralization of Bitcoin’s ownership belies the cryptocurrency’s purported decentralization. According to Bloomberg data from November of 2020, only 2% of accounts possessed 95% of the Bitcoin.
This number, however, does not take into consideration the fact that wallet addresses, such as those used by Bitcoin exchanges, might store Bitcoin on behalf of dozens or even millions of different users, as Glassnode pointed out in a direct response.
Bitcoin’s supply also looks to be more evenly distributed over different percentiles compared to other leading cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Dogecoin. CoinMarketCap reports that while just 9% of all Bitcoin is held by these same addresses, this is not the case for DOGE (64% of DOGE) or Ethereum (38% of ETH).
At the same time, new information from IntoTheBlock reveals that the percentage of Bitcoin holders who own more than 100 Bitcoin has decreased over time, from 69.5% in 2013 to 59.8% now.
