The number of Bitcoin addresses is approaching 30 million but growing slowly. Is the bull market really coming?

The price of Bitcoin fluctuated around 10,000 USD, and after a brief drop, it returned to 10,000 USD on the 12th. Is the foundation supporting the rise in Bitcoin prices solid? What is the market confidence? We can analyze this from the number of addresses.

The latest data shows that the number of Bitcoin addresses has reached 29.05 million, close to the 30 million mark. However, the number of Bitcoin addresses has grown very slowly, only increasing by about 4% from six months ago. It is still unclear whether it will break the 30 million mark when the halving occurs. The halving sentiment is not obvious in the number of addresses.

Let’s look at the detailed data: On September 1, 2019, there were about 157,000 addresses holding at least 10 bitcoins. Six months later, there are 154,183 addresses holding more than 10 bitcoins. This shows that despite the steady rise in the price of the currency, the number of people holding more than 10 bitcoins has decreased by about 2%, and the concentration of bitcoin holdings by institutions and exchanges is increasing.

The number of addresses holding more than 100,000 bitcoins also dropped from 4 to 3. Of course, this may be because the big whales split the addresses.

The trend of the number of addresses also proves Wu's previous judgment that although the price of the currency has returned to $10,000, there are few new users and the growth of retail investors is almost negligible, so the halving is not very attractive to retail investors. This also involves a fundamental problem: the number of new cryptocurrency users is stagnant, and compared with traditional financial investment channels, many retail investors do not see the uniqueness and superiority of cryptocurrency.

The number of active Bitcoin addresses exceeded 1 million in June 2019, the second time since November 2017. The number of active addresses is closely linked to the price of the currency, and there is currently an upward trend. If the price of Bitcoin continues to rise, the number of active addresses may exceed 1 million again.

Compared with Bitcoin, the number of Ethereum addresses still maintains a steady growth curve. However, since Ethereum often creates addresses in batches, the number of addresses is not very meaningful.

Bitcoin is similar to gold in the cryptocurrency world, and its storage value is relatively large, so the number of addresses is an indicator. In contrast, Ethereum, as a second-generation cryptocurrency, has more extensive scalability functions, so the key indicator is transaction data. It can be seen that the number of Ethereum transactions is still sluggish, and there is still some distance from the mid-2019 data.