The total number of bitcoin addresses that contain BTC has hit a new all-time high of 28.39 million, surpassing a late 2018 record. Alex Thorn, Cryptocurrency investor was the first to spot the trend, and said that this may be a good measure to assess how many users bitcoin actually has.
Making Use of data provided by blockchain analytics firm Coinmetrics, investor Alex Thorn saw the trend. Commenting ,Thorn said that calculating the total amount of bitcoin addresses with any balance “is one of the best proxies we have to approximate the total number of individual bitcoin users.”
He tweeted “The total number of bitcoin addresses that hold any amount of BTC has hit an all-time high at 28.39M addresses, surpassing the previous ATH of 28.38M (achieved on 1/10/18). (Data via @coinmetrics Pro)”
Looking at the data it’s clear the number of bitcoin addresses had a relatively smooth upward trajectory for the first nine years of the cryptocurrency’s existence. It however fell in late 2017 after crypto prices started decreasing rapidly in value.
While bitcoin’s price isn’t even close to its all-time high, the number of addresses with any BTC balance in them is.
Thorn however said that this might not be that accurate as one user can create many addresses for security purposes, which inflates the numbers. But as the same time, various users keep their funds on cryptocurrency exchanges, which aggregate them on single, large addresses in cold storage.