The study shows that the number of BTC addresses holding the Bitcoin tokens have surged by more than 10%. Also, a detailed observation demonstrates that retail participation is also on the rise.
There’s good news for Bitcoin investors and enthusiasts! The study of some on-chain metrics and Bitcoin wallets shows that the world’s largest cryptocurrency has been in the accumulation zone over the last 12 months.
As on January 14, nearly 784,000 addresses were holding one or Bitcoin tokens. This is also an 11% surge from the 707,000 addresses holding BTC a year ago. Furthermore, the blockchain intelligence company Glassnode noted that total addresses holding BTC have doubled since 2015.
DATA: The number of addresses with 1 or more bitcoins rose by 77,000 in 12 months.
As of Jan. 14, there were 784,000 addresses holding 1 or more bitcoins, up 11% from 707,000 seen a year ago. This number has more than doubled since early 2015. Are retail accumulating Bitcoin? pic.twitter.com/nMbkryepE9
— Bloqport (@Bloqport) January 22, 2020
Well, last year’s BTC price revival from a low of $3,200 and hitting a 2019-high above $13,000 clearly indicates some accumulation activity going on. But then how can we be sure about the rise in “retail” participation or “institutional” participation?
There’s no denying that the rise in addresses can come with “crypto whales” and “exchanges” participating. However, such addresses often hold large sums of Bitcoin and rank at the top of Bitcon’s “rich list”. BitInforCharts has published a “rich list” wherein three of the top five addresses belong to popular exchanges like Bitfinex, Huobi, and Binance.
We can clearly see that the number of addresses holding between 0.1 BTC and 1 BTC has surged by 10 percent.
Growing Adoption as Store of Value
Connor Abendschein, an analyst at Digital Assets Data, said:
“The steady rise is the result of accumulation by retail buyers. The rising number of addresses accumulating greater amounts of BTC is a sign that adoption as a store of value is increasing”.
The number of addresses accumulating Bitcoins between 0.1 BTC to 1 TC has surged in the last three years. This is also a strong indication of the fact of growing retail accumulation. The Bitcoin accumulation distributed across different addresses shows a good sign of wealth distribution. Speaking to CoinDesk, Yassine Elmandjra, crypto asset analyst at ARK Invest, said:
“Address balances are a good proxy for potential unique users. The growth in unique BTC addresses suggests a continued increase in BTC’s wealth distribution.”
However, a majority of the market is still dominated by whales. During the peak of the crypto market in December 2017, crypto whales alone contributed 38% of the total market. This figure has grown to 42.1 percent as of December 2019.
Since the start of 2020, the BTC price has surged nearly 30% bringing optimism back among the investors. At press time, BTC is trading at around $8,409 with a market cap of $152 billion.
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