Picture this: you’ve been watching Bitcoin climb toward $100k, everyone on X is screaming “we’re so early,” and yet something strange just happened that nobody saw coming.
For the first time since Satoshi mined the genesis block, the number of Bitcoin addresses holding more than 0.1 BTC has actually declined over a full two-year stretch. Not a blip, not a dip during a bear market — a sustained drop of 2.3% from December 2023 to December 2025.
When I first saw the chart, I had to double-check the date. It felt wrong. Almost every cycle we’ve told ourselves the same story: more addresses = more adoption = price goes up forever. But the chain doesn’t care about our narratives.
The First Real Decline in 16 Years
Let’s get the raw numbers out of the way so we’re all on the same page.
Two years ago, roughly 4.55 million Bitcoin addresses held at least 0.1 BTC (about $9,000 at today’s prices). As of this week, that figure sits at 4.44 million. That’s more than 100,000 addresses that either spent down below the threshold or consolidated their holdings elsewhere.
Compare that to every previous two-year window since 2009 — every single one showed growth, often explosive growth. Even during the 2018–2020 bear market the count kept climbing because people were quietly accumulating.
This time? It’s different.
Here’s a quick look at how unusual this is:
- 2011–2013: +1,200% growth in >0.1 BTC addresses
- 2014–2016: +180% growth
- 2017–2019 (peak to trough): still +42%
- 2020–2022 (Covid crash & recovery): +68%
- 2023–2025: -2.3%
That negative sign sticks out like a sore thumb.
It’s Not the Tiny Shrimp Wallets
One of the first reactions I see is “oh, it’s just dust wallets getting cleaned up.” Not quite.
Addresses with >0.01 BTC (roughly $900) only dropped only 0.7% over the same period — less than a third of the decline we’re seeing at the 0.1 BTC level. That tells us the effect is concentrated in what most of us would call “meaningful” retail-sized stacks.
In other words, the classic HODLer who finally scraped together a tenth of a coin? A bunch of them are no longer showing up in that bracket.
So Where Did All the Bitcoin Go?
There are four big explanations floating around, and honestly they’re all playing a role at the same time.
1. The ETF Effect — The Elephant in the Room
Ever since spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024, retail investors have poured tens of billions into products from BlackRock, Fidelity, Ark, and others. Those coins don’t sit in your Ledger or Trezor — they sit in a handful of massive custodial wallets controlled by Coinbase Custody or similar.
One single custody address can represent hundreds of thousands of individual investors. When grandma buys IBIT in her IRA, her 0.15 BTC never hits an on-chain address with >0.1 BTC. It just increases the balance of a mega-wallet that already holds millions.
I’ve talked to plenty of friends who used to self-custody everything and have now moved serious chunks into ETFs for simplicity, tax advantages, or because their financial advisor told them to. It’s convenient, and for a lot of people that outweighs the “not your keys, not your coins” mantra.
“Most new capital coming into Bitcoin today never touches a personal wallet. It goes straight from fiat → custodian → ETF share.”
— On-chain analyst (paraphrased)
2. Smarter Security Practices
Self-custody hasn’t disappeared — it’s evolved.
Ten years ago the average serious HODLer kept everything in one or two addresses. Today? People are:
- Spreading coins across dozens of UTXOs
- Using XPUB structures so each deposit address looks separate
- Running collaborative custody setups (e.g. g. Casa, Unchained)
- Even XOR-ing seed phrases across multiple hardware wallets
All of that makes the same total holdings look like lots of smaller balances on-chain. Someone with 5 BTC spread intelligently might not have a single address above 0.1 BTC anymore.
Frankly, this is healthy. Large single-address balances were always a security anti-pattern.
3. Profit-Taking After the 2024–2025 Run
Let’s not pretend nobody sold.
Bitcoin went from ~$38k in late 2023 to over $90k today. That’s a 140%+ move. Plenty of 2021–2022 buyers who stacked at $20k–$40k have now taken profits or at least trimmed positions.
Some moved the proceeds into altcoins (guilty), some into real estate, some just into stablecoins waiting for the next leg up. When those coins leave the ecosystem or drop below 0.1 BTC, they disappear from the metric.
I expect this effect to be relatively small compared to the ETF and security-practice shifts, but it’s definitely there.
4. Exchange and Custodial Consolidation
Exchanges have gotten incredibly good at batching withdrawals and keeping user funds in hot/cold structures that minimize on-chain footprint.
Binance, Coinbase, Kraken — their main cold wallets often hold hundreds of thousands of BTC, but the vast majority of users never withdraw to personal addresses anymore. Why pay $5–$50 in fees when you can trade in and out instantly on the exchange?
Again, the coins are still there, but they’re not spread across millions of personal addresses like they were in 2017 or 2021.
Should We Be Worried?
Here’s where I land personally.
No — this isn’t a death knell for Bitcoin adoption. If anything, it’s a sign of maturation.
Think about it like internet users in the 90s versus today. Back then every household had their own dial-up account you could track. Now billions of people access the internet without ever owning a router or running a node — they just use cloud services. Does that mean the internet failed? Obviously not.
Bitcoin is going through the same transition from cypherpunk toy to global financial asset. The on-chain footprint of 2025 simply looks different from the on-chain of 2017, and that’s okay.
That said, I do think it’s a wake-up call for anyone who measures adoption purely by “number of addresses go up.” That metric worked beautifully for the first 12 years. It’s becoming noisier now.
Better proxies going forward might be:
- Total unique entities with any balance (Glassnode’s “economic entities”)
- Hash rate & network security budget
- Lightning Network capacity and payment volume
- Real-world merchant adoption metrics
- Cumulative ETF + institutional holdings
Those paint a much healthier picture than the raw >0.1 BTC address count right now.
What This Means for the Next Cycle
If history is any guide, the addresses metric will probably start climbing again once we enter the euphoric phase of the bull market. New retail money tends to flow straight into personal wallets during that period — think 2017 and late 2020/early 2021.
But the baseline will be lower than it would have been without ETFs and modern custody practices. We may never see 6–8 million >0.1 BTC addresses the way some older models predicted.
And honestly? That’s fine. I’d rather have $20 trillion in Bitcoin held safely by institutions and savvy self-custodians than $5 trillion spread across millions of poorly secured hot wallets.
The network keeps growing. The distribution of holders keeps growing. It’s just getting harder to see in the raw address counts.
So the next time someone posts the classic “number of Bitcoin addresses with >0.1 BTC” chart and panics about the drop, you can smile knowingly.
It’s not that fewer people own Bitcoin.
It’s that Bitcoin finally grew up.
