Never before has so much Bitcoin been in the hands of ordinary people

According to Glassnode, 17% of all bitcoins are owned by ordinary people, or what they call retailers. This share has never been as high as it is now. What is going on?

Bitcoin stocks are rising

Will Clemente is a young analyst who rose to prominence for his Twitter charts. In one of your latest tweets he shares the diagram below from Glassnode.

The black line is the logarithmically plotted Bitcoin price. The line filled in green shows the share of the retail trade in the total stock.

“Still not perfect, but solid for a 12-year asset and definitely moving in the right direction,” said Will Clemente. “The Bitcoin supply expands over time, while the fiat holder focuses on whales over time.”

This is an interesting trend, in the world of the dollar and the euro the rich get richer, but with bitcoin you see that wealth is better distributed. It’s not perfect yet, says Clemente, but the trend is moving in the right direction.

Why are there more and more Bitcoin traders?

But what does it mean that there are more and more “smaller” addresses? According to the Bank for International Settlements, this is closely related to the exchange rate. They say it has nothing to do with distrust of governments, banks, national currencies or any other public institution.

This conclusion is not watertight: the price is nothing special and there is currently no hype. But confidence in our (central) banks and the euro is no longer so stable due to inflation. The government is also working hard to keep the energy bill manageable.

Another factor is that major international cryptocurrency exchanges did not seem as safe as previously thought. This caused investors to flock to their FTX and Binance cryptocurrencies to manage them themselves.

In short, there is no clear reason why retailers are now taking their destiny (read: Bitcoin) into their own hands. As always, more factors come into play.

Up to 10 bitcoins for normal people

If you zoom in on the chart legend, you can see how Glassnode ranks a retailer. This is a fairly broad definition, Glassnode counts any wallet with a maximum of 10 Bitcoin as retail. At the current price of Bitcoin, this is worth almost 160,000 euros BTC.

Good to know that Glassnode filters out exchanges and miners. It is quite possible that a single address belongs to thousands of users. For example, the bitcoins of all BLOX users are stored offline, with only a few addresses. This makes it look like some addresses are super rich, but in reality they belong to multiple users.

92% of all Bitcoin is controlled by 2%

The American news agency Bloomberg made a mistake last year. They wrote an article stating that 95% of all bitcoin is controlled by 2%. The reactions were clear, because Bloomberg did not take collective addresses into account.

In addition to the exchange addresses mentioned above, such as the one on BLOX, some 4 million bitcoins were lost. This is because they were sent to the wrong address or the owner no longer has access because the login codes have been lost.

There are also addresses for so-called packaged Bitcoins. Users can send bitcoins to a company, they block the coins on the blockchain and return an equal amount to use on other blockchains. For example, you can use your Bitcoin to trade Ethereum on a decentralized exchange. At the moment there are 186,000 Bitcoins packaged.

Not all bitcoin addresses are the same

Glassnode says they include this in their figures. They also try to group addresses together as best they can. A bitcoiner can also use multiple receiving addresses.

Not all bitcoin addresses should be treated equally. For example, an exchange address containing millions of user credits should be distinguished from a person’s self-custodial address. A bitcoin address is not an “account”. One user can manage multiple addresses and one address can store multiple users’ money.’