A recent report by cryptocurrency research publication Diar has revealed some interesting statistics about Bitcoin wallets and the nature of their owners. The findings show that the majority of Bitcoin is held in a small number of wallets and many of these have had no outgoing transactions even despite the 2018 bear market.
Resolve Amongst Long-Term Holders Seems Strong
The report is featured in the September issue of Diar and was published yesterday.
It claims that over 55% of Bitcoins are currently stored in wallets that contain over 200 coins. This makes their total value over $1.26 million at the time of writing.
Interestingly enough, 1/3 of the wallets which contain 200 or more Bitcoins have never made an outgoing transaction. This indicates that either early investors have lost access to their wallets or that those holding the coins believe so deeply in Bitcoin that the wild price swings seen over the last twelve months do not concern the owners of the wallets.
The Diar report also states that over 87% of Bitcoins are currently being stored in wallets with balances of over 10 BTC. This represents a total value of just less than $100 billion. These coins are held in just 0.7% of all Bitcoin addresses.
For wallets with more than 100 coins, the number drops to just 0.1% of all wallets whilst representing 62% of all outstanding Bitcoins.
However, these figures do not simply represent a small number of incredibly wealthy individuals. They are much more likely to be owned by cryptocurrency exchanges themselves. This is because many users and investors are fine with breaking one of the cardinal rules of digital currencies – don’t store them on exchanges. Huge numbers of coins kept in exchange wallets give hackers an enormous honeypot to try to break into. Despite the dangers, many prefer to sacrifice convenience for security it seems.
It is believed that 3.8% of the total Bitcoin supply are sat in wallets that are managed by large exchange platforms such as Coinbase. This figure represents $4.28 billion.
The Diar report also supports an earlier research paper published by Chainalysis. Both studies estimate that there is a strong chance that as many as 30% of all Bitcoin are lost or yet to be mined.
Accompanying the text in the Diar report is a chart that places figures next to each different wallet type. It states:
- 13% of Bitcoin are held in transactional accounts;
- 15% of Bitcoin are held in exchange wallets;
- 25% of all Bitcoin are held as long-term investments;
- 17% of all Bitcoin are held by shorter-term speculators;
- 30% of the Bitcoin supply is lost or yet to be mined.
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