Bitcoin Is Now Held In One Million Individual Wallets

(CTN News) – There was a significant milestone reached earlier this week by wallets that held at least one bitcoin (BTC), suggesting that long-term sentiment for the token remains intact even as volatility in broader markets weighs down bitcoin prices.

According to a report from on-chain analytics tool Glassnode, the number of wallets holding more than one token surpassed the million mark on Monday, surpassing the number of wallets holding just one token.

In comparison to February last year, this represents an increase of 20% over the previous month.

As per the data, the number of bitcoin wallets holding one token has increased by 79,000 between November and January – during the period when the price of fell from over $22,000 to briefly under $16,000 as a result of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.

Despite the recent rise in ‘Bitcoin Request for Comment’ (BRC-20) tokens, the number of wealthy holders has barely increased, with only 30,000 new wallets holding one having been added since March, when the BRC-20 standard was first launched.

As a result of these standards, developers are able to issue tokens on the network and build decentralized financial services (DeFi) such as lending and borrowing on the network.

It has contributed to the rise of fees on the Bitcoin blockchain to two-year highs as the demand for block space has increased, with altcoins issued via reaching a cumulative market capitalization of as much as $1.6 billion earlier this month, which is a two-year high.

However, despite the fact that there are large numbers of holders, some market observers have observed that the majority of bitcoin transactions are coming from wallets that hold a smaller amount of coins.

Tom Rodgers, Head of Research at ETC Group, in an email to CoinDesk, noted that during the last peak in 2019, most Bitcoin transactions skewed towards larger transactions of $1,000 to $10,000.

“This suggests most users were using the blockchain for trading purposes,” he concluded.

“This is a very different picture from what you saw last week. The largest number of transactions were under $1 – 359,560.

“This suggests a huge increase in Bitcoin velocity, or the amount of bitcoin that is being transacted by users, instead of being stored in cold wallets and held for a long period of time,” Rodgers explained.

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