There are now more than one million active bitcoin addresses for the first time since 2017 with it just about reaching the highest level ever as pictured above.
That means more than one million new addresses are being used daily, showing a significant increase in demand for the bitcoin network.
Little more is known about these addresses except that the vast majority are in sats, illustrating a continued distribution in ownership.
Some 75% hold between zero and 0.01 BTC, the latter worth $350. While 5 million addresses (16%) has between 0.01 and 0.1 BTC with just 2 million addresses having one bitcoin.
Interestingly just one address holds more than 100,000 bitcoin, unlike 2017 when there were quite a few.
This shows the definition of a bitcoin whale is changing but also that entities tend to chop up their bitcoin holdings into numerous addresses.
GrayScale for example has 600,000 bitcoins, but they would be very foolish and maybe even delisted if they held them all in one address due to that being a single point of failure. So they distribute them to many addresses.
Thus one address does not mean one unique owner nor one beneficial owner with Coinbase’s addresses for example belonging to millions of customers.
The change in unique addresses therefore is more illustrative as here we can better estimate by how much demand is growing, albeit still with limits as one person can create and use numerous addresses.
Still the change in usage from 300,000 unique addresses in March 2018 to now more than a million shows a 3x increase in adoption during this period.
That’s perhaps at the very least because you can combine numerous transactions into one address usage, something that wasn’t much adopted back then but is now more widespread to squeeze in capacity.
Thus demand has clearly been growing considerably as retail seemingly starts returning to bitcoin.
