The Bitcoin’s price volatile movements are constantly shocking the market. Going from great highs to great lows, the people’s currency is not doing very well in terms of market cap and adoption, it seems. One of the possible explanations of the great volatility in prices was that Bitcoin “whales”, or investors who hold especially large amounts of Bitcoins, are moving their assets or just selling.
Now, a research by the National Business Daily financial publication (NBD), which is state-run in China, has found out that less than 1% of investors hold around 87% of the current Bitcoin supply. In perspective, this means that nearly $62 billion is controlled by 0.7% of investors.
In addition, of the 22.6 million addresses that contain some Bitcoins, 97.2% have less than 1 full Bitcoin. It’s only 0.7% of investors that have more than 10 Bitcoins in their wallets. The group that controls more than 97% of the Bitcoin market is actually controlling not more than $4 billion.
Not surprisingly, the two addresses that had the most Bitcoins were Bitfinex and Binance. This is not surprising as they hold large amounts of Bitcoins for their customers.
The private investors account for only 14% of the total BTC addresses and around 37% of all addresses are relevant in an economic sense, i.e. they belong to firms or users that actually own the digital coin. The rest is used for just payments and facilitation of transactions.