The richest Bitcoin addresses and their distribution
According to the specialist website BitInfoCharts, there will be just over 4,000 addresses that contain more than 10 million dollars in Bitcoin.
The most influential Bitcoin addresses
252,597 Bitcoins, that’s how much the richest Bitcoin wallet would account for, while the second richest address has just over 168,000. According to estimates prepared by experts, in fact the largest holder of Bitcoin would be its mysterious inventor, who hides behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamotowho would be in possession of more than 1 million Bitcoin.
There are only five Bitcoin wallets with more than 100,000 BTC and therefore with a value of more than 2 billion dollars. As you know, Bitcoin was created to have a limited supply of coins that will correspond to 21 million. The five richest wallets currently in circulation together represent 4.08% of the total coins in circulation.
The amount of Bitcoin that each address layer has relative to the entire Bitcoin supply fluctuates over time. The five largest BTC addresses own a total of 778,627 BTC. The next 92 largest holders, from 10,000 to 100,000 BTC, own a total of 2,169,396 BTC. These 97 richest addresses account for 14.15% of the total offer. Bitcoin addresses with 10,000 or more Bitcoins are referred to as whales by the crypto financial community.
Interestingly enough from BitInfoCharts data, of the five richest wallets, as many as three are deposited on the Binance exchange, and one of the second largest on Bitfinex. It is very easy to guess that one of the three addresses may actually belong to the exchange’s founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Zhao’s net worth was around $96 billion as of January 2022, although the Forbes ranking puts him at “only” $65 billion, making him a long way off the richest person in the world in the cryptocurrency industry.
The alleged address belonging to the CEO of FTX and the following richest people
As for the second most significant Bitcoin address, it is claimed to be deposited with the FTX exchange. It’s hard not to believe that it actually belongs to the billionaire and eclectic founder of the stock exchange itself, Sam Bankman-Fried, who has seen a meteoric rise in his business and is now considered the second richest man in the world in the crypto industry. An honors graduate of the prestigious MIT in Boston, in 2019 he founded FTX, one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, and Forbes estimated his fortune to be worth around $26.5 billion as of October 2021.
Two other billionaires who are very well known in the crypto world are the twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who with great foresight turned the millions they made from the lawsuit against Facebook and their former college colleague Zuckerberg, who was accused of stealing the idea of the social from them , to cryptocurrencies. They became the first billionaires in the cryptocurrency ecosystem after Bitcoin prices skyrocketed in late 2017. Forbes estimates their net worth at around $5 billion.
On the corporate side, however, it is now widely known that MicroStrategy is the company that holds by far the largest amount of Bitcoin, just under 130,000 for a counter value of more than $2.6 billion, although the market’s downturn puts the company in serious trouble with a loans taken out specifically to buy Bitcoin, which could force it into a close call.
Tesla’s Bitcoin holdings
Meanwhile, Tesla Inc. more than 10,800 BTC, which is the second largest amount of Bitcoin held by a single company, a 0.051% of the total BTC supply, having sold more than 31,000 BTC in recent months. The third largest Bitcoin holding of a public company is Galaxy Digital Holdings, which holds 16,400 BTC.
Institutional investors in the crypto world
When it comes to institutional investors, the biggest holders of Bitcoin are undoubtedly ETFs. They own a total of 816,379 BTC, 3.88% of the total Bitcoin supply. The largest bitcoin ETF is Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which owns 654,600 BTC, or nearly 3.2% of the total supply. In total, ETFs, public and private companies own nearly 1.5 million BTC, more than 7% of the total supply.
Governments all over the world also have Bitcoin, totaling approx 259,870 BTC, which represents 1.23% of the total supply and exceeds the country’s own gold reserves. Reports say that Bulgaria has more than 213,519 BTC and members of the Ukrainian government privately hold about 46,351 BTC. According to some estimates, the US government also has about 70,000 Bitcoin, partly obtained from seizures of cryptocurrencies used for illegal trading.
