There are now 40 million addresses that hold one sat or more according to blockchain data with this being an all time high as bitcoin continues to become one of the most distributed asset.
There are 20.2 million addresses that hold up to 0.001 bitcoin, that being about $50. This is twice more than in 2019 and six million more than at the peak in January 2018.
Almost ten million addresses now hold up to 0.01 bitcoin, worth $500. This is a 30% increase over 2020 when about seven million addresses had this much bitcoin when we covered it and it’s a doubling over 2018 as well as 2019.
Thereafter there isn’t as stark of a difference with six million addresses holding up to $5,000 bitcoin. That’s up by one million over last year, and by 1.5 million over 2018.
It’s not too clear whether we can discern anything from this comparative data. Not least because there are caveats as one address can be many people and one person can be many addresses.
However one thing we can say is that there has been growth and fairly significant growth, something that can be useful to estimate what bitcoin’s floor is currently, maybe around $40,000 but without taking into account the halvening.
What would be more shaky to suggest is that retail is leading. That’s because there has been a lot more growth in lower addresses than higher ones, but big money probably doesn’t get into the business of dealing with private keys, unless it’s as a service.
They just buy some of the euro or Canadian Exchange Traded Products (ETPs), or like Morgan Stanley they boomer-ly buy Grayscale bitcoin shares.
Those 10k addresses are probably mostly Coinbase. They up by about 500 since 2018, or 500,000 bitcoin, $27 billion. Up by about 200 since 2019 and by 50 since 2020. The latter being $2.7 billion.
So the higher you go, there’s smaller movements in numbers, but that translates to big bitcoin movements. Up to 10 bitcoin, 100,000 new addresses have been added. That translates to 300,000 BTC.
So bitcoin’s gains in price are due to significant adoption. Just how much is difficult to estimate, but the lowest address is probably difficult to fake as it’s mostly a product of change left in the account.
Some of that dust has become valuable over the years, so with imperfect data we’d guess there has been a 50% growth of onchain adoption since four years ago.
If we account for the 2020 halvening, then bitcoin is probably within a reasonable price range in the current high $50ks to $60,000s. If we want to price in the next halvening and the potential for more adoption, then it might be undervalued.
That’s because we might be near the floor, but just what is indeed the case is of course for the market to say.
