A row of golden Bitcoin coins arranged from smallest to largest, from tiny scattered specks to enormous coins in the foreground, against a dark background with circuit-board texture
AI-generated illustration — does not represent real data.

89 Addresses Hold 15% of All Bitcoin. Here's the Catch Before You Read Too Much Into That.

NodeWitness Team 2 min read

Our node's most recent snapshot shows 89 addresses holding more than 10,000 BTC each, together accounting for roughly 15% of all counted supply. Before reading that as "89 people control a seventh of Bitcoin," there's a distinction that changes what the number actually says.

The caveat comes first, not as a footnote

A node sees addresses, not owners. An exchange's cold wallet, an ETF's custody address backing thousands of separate holders, and a single convinced individual all read identically on-chain: a balance grouped under one script. There's no way to tell them apart from chain data alone, and since spot bitcoin ETFs started operating, that ambiguity weighs more heavily on the largest cohorts than it ever did before.

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.

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.

This isn't continuous yet. Generating a snapshot is a manual process that takes minutes to run, so it repeats roughly weekly rather than block by block. As of this piece, we're at 9 snapshots since late June 2026.

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, 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.

Last updated: September 8, 2026