More than half of Bitcoin’s circulating supply remains in wallets that blockchain researchers cannot connect to identifiable owners, even as the cryptocurrency gains wider acceptance among traditional financial institutions. Galaxy’s October data estimates that approximately 11.1 million BTC, representing around 55% of the total supply, falls into this unattributed category.
The coins could belong to individual investors, unidentified institutional holders or people who have lost access to their Bitcoin.
Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy, views the figures as evidence that self-custody continues to play a major role in the Bitcoin market. Despite the rise of exchanges, ETFs and institutional custody services, many investors still prefer to hold their private keys themselves.
“More than half of all BTC supply is sitting in addresses with no known attribution despite all the institutionalization and centralized ownership over the years, still a ton of bitcoin (maybe even most) is held by individuals in self-custody,” Thorn wrote on X.
Xapo Bank, which focuses on Bitcoin-related financial services, echoed that view. The bank said the large number of coins in unidentified wallets demonstrates that retail investors have participated in the market for more than a decade, long before institutional adoption accelerated.
According to Xapo, Bitcoin’s appeal comes partly from its ability to let people manage their own money without depending on banks or other intermediaries.
Bitcoin operates on a public blockchain that allows users to transfer value across borders. Miners verify transactions and add them to the ledger, receiving newly issued BTC as compensation. Its decentralized design has helped establish Bitcoin as an alternative to conventional financial systems.
Although blockchain transactions are publicly visible, wallet addresses do not automatically reveal the identities of their owners. Anyone can inspect an address’s balance and transaction history, but connecting it to a person or organization requires additional evidence. Firms such as Galaxy analyze wallet activity and known connections to identify addresses associated with exchanges, funds and other large holders.
Unknown Wallets Do Not Always Mean Individual Investors
The 55% figure should not be interpreted as proof that all unattributed Bitcoin belongs to retail investors who are deliberately holding their coins for the long term.
Some holdings may be permanently inaccessible because their owners have forgotten their private keys or died without leaving the information needed to recover the funds.
Other coins date back to Bitcoin’s early mining period. These include holdings potentially associated with miners other than the participant linked to the Patoshi pattern, a group of early blocks that researchers believe were mined by a single entity commonly associated with Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Unidentified institutional holdings may also account for part of the total. Investment funds, companies and over-the-counter trading desks can hold Bitcoin without their wallet addresses being publicly linked to them. Custodians that distribute assets across numerous addresses can make ownership attribution even more difficult.
Galaxy has identified the owners or categories associated with the other 45% of Bitcoin’s supply. These include cryptocurrency exchanges, ETFs managed by firms such as BlackRock, the U.S. government and the holdings associated with the Satoshi Nakamoto Patoshi pattern.
Galaxy estimates the latter category at 1,123,658 BTC and tracks it separately as the “Satoshi-era miner pattern.”
The figures highlight a contrast in Bitcoin’s evolution: institutional products and Wall Street participation continue to expand, yet the largest share of its supply remains in addresses with no confirmed ownership attribution. Public blockchain data makes it possible to track the movement of coins, but it does not necessarily reveal who controls them.
