87 Addresses Hold Nearly 15% of All Bitcoin. Here's the Catch Before You Read Too Much Into That.
Our node's October 18, 2026 snapshot (block 971,930) shows 87 addresses holding more than 10,000 BTC each, together accounting for 14.79% of all counted supply. Before reading that as "87 people control a seventh of Bitcoin," there's a distinction that changes what the number actually says.
The short answer: we group every unspent output in our node's UTXO set by address and sort the balances into nine wallet-size cohorts, from dust under 0.001 BTC to whales over 10,000 BTC. The top cohort mixes exchange wallets, ETF custody and individuals. The live split for every cohort is on our Bitcoin wallet distribution chart [1].
The caveat comes first, not as a footnote
That doesn't invalidate the data. It changes which question it actually answers. Not "how many wealthy individuals hold bitcoin," but "how is supply distributed across wallet sizes, regardless of who's behind each one." With that framing settled, here are the numbers.
Nine cohorts, dust to whales
Every address is classified by its total balance: dust (under 0.001 BTC), shrimp (0.001-0.01), crabs (0.01-0.1), octopi (0.1-1), fish (1-10), dolphins (10-100), sharks (100-1,000), orcas (1,000-10,000), and whales (over 10,000 BTC). Same scale used across the rest of the site, so cohort names mean the same thing on every page.
In the latest snapshot, the large cohorts dominate: sharks and orcas each sit in the 21-26% range, whales around 15%. At the other end, tens of millions of dust and shrimp addresses add up to a sliver of total supply, plenty of addresses, very little balance behind most of them. Counts by band can mislead too: when Santiment reported a record number of wallets holding 100 to 10,000 BTC in October 2026, our node's check found that, on net, the growth since July came from the sharks band alone.
How we compute it, without leaning on anyone else's number
The mechanism is the same one behind our HODL waves series: start from a complete snapshot of our own node's unspent coin set (dumptxoutset), then group every UTXO by its destination script, no address resolution needed since the raw script is already the grouping key the snapshot stores. Each group's total balance decides its cohort.
Generating a new snapshot still takes minutes, so going forward it keeps repeating roughly weekly rather than block by block. Going backward, though, it's no longer just a handful of recent snapshots: a rollback-based rebuild of the UTXO set generated hundreds of weekly snapshots going back to January 2018, with the odd single week still unprocessed.
Checked against Bitcoin's real issuance schedule
Every snapshot carries its own sanity check: total counted BTC gets compared against what the known Bitcoin issuance schedule says should exist at that block height, computed independently. In the latest one, the gap sits at about −0.001%, the expected order of magnitude for genuinely unspendable UTXOs (the genesis block, a couple of historical coinbase quirks), not a parsing error. The full satoshi-level breakdown of that gap is in how many bitcoin exist.
This cohort breakdown is a single snapshot: it tells you how much BTC sits in each address-size bracket right now, not whether that bracket has been buying or selling for months. For that second question we track, separately, whether long-term holders keep refusing to sell as price moves.
Sources
Labelled by type.
- NodeWitness, our own data, verifiable on Bitcoin wallet distribution chart, Supply and Holders. (Primary, own data)
The full, current dataset, including the comparison across snapshots, lives on the holder distribution chart. For more on the custody bias specifically, we cover it in Supply and Holders.
More in Supply and holders
Last updated: October 19, 2026