1% of Bitcoin addresses control 87% of the total BTC offer

Article by leaprate:

The Bitcoin’s volatile price action is constantly shocking the market. Going from great highs to great lows, the people’s currency is not doing very well in terms of market cap and adoption, it seems. One of the possible explanations of the great volatility in prices is that Bitcoin “whales”, or investors who hold especially large amounts of Bitcoins, are moving their assets or just selling.

Now, a research effort conducted by the National Business Daily publication, which is state-run in China, has uncovered that under 1% of investors hold around 87% of the current Bitcoin supply. In perspective, this means that nearly $62 billion is controlled by 0.7% of investors.

In addition, of the 22.6 million addresses that contain some Bitcoins, 97.2% have less than 1 entire Bitcoin. Only 0.7% of investors have more than 10 Bitcoins in their wallets. The group that controls more than 97% of the Bitcoin market is actually controlling no more than $4 billion.

Not surprisingly, the two addresses that had the most Bitcoins were Bitfinex and Binance. This is not surprising as they hold large amounts of Bitcoins for their clients.

The private investors account for only 14% of the total BTC addresses and around 37% of all addresses are relevant in an economic sense, i.e. they belong to firms or users that actually own the digital asset. The rest is used for just payments and facilitation of transactions.