97% of Bitcoin addresses hold 1 Bitcoin or less

Bitcoin has come a long way since January 2017. Back then, the price of each Bitcoin was well under $1,000 — compared to around $30,000 as of January 21.

But interestingly, despite Bitcoin’s explosive growth in popularity and price over the past five years, and despite the influx of institutional investors in 2020, the actual distribution of Bitcoin has not changed much.

Using data from Bitinfocharts, we analyzed the distribution of Bitcoin at five points in history: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and January 2021. As shown in the figure below, Bitcoin distribution has not changed much.

The majority of Bitcoin addresses (just over 50%) have between 0 and 0.001 BTC in 2021, which is not much different from the past few years. At today’s prices, 0.001 BTC is around $38.

The biggest change has been in addresses holding between 0.001 BTC and 0.01 BTC ($38 to $380 at today’s prices). These comprised just over 17% of all Bitcoin addresses in 2017, but have been rising steadily and now account for nearly 25%.

The next tier, 0.01 BTC to 0.1 BTC (or $380 to $3,800), accounted for about 16% of all Bitcoin addresses in 2021, which isn’t a big change — it fluctuated between 16% and 18% each year over the previous four years.

After that, about 7% of Bitcoin addresses hold between 0.1 and 1 BTC. Again, this is not a big change from previous years.

Addresses holding 1 BTC or less account for more than 97% of all addresses, and the number shrinks sharply as you go up the tier.

Taking 2021 as an example, there are only 100 Bitcoin addresses holding 10,000 to 100,000 BTC. And there is only one address at the top level of 100,000 to 1 million BTC. This address currently holds more than 141,000 BTC, which is worth about $5.4 billion at current prices.

Of course, analyzing the distribution of Bitcoin among different addresses does not really tell the truth about the distribution of Bitcoin among the population, because some of these addresses represent organizations such as crypto exchanges, and a person may have more than one Bitcoin wallet address.

According to Bitinfocharts, there are a total of 33.9 million Bitcoin addresses, and there is no doubt that Bitcoin’s community is constantly expanding.

Even if we assume that each Bitcoin address represents a unique individual, the number of Bitcoin holders is still small. They account for less than half of the world's population. This means that Bitcoin should still have a lot of room for development. (LongHash Blockchain Information)