Despite Rising Adoption, 27% of Bitcoin Supply Is Held in 10,000 Whale Wallets

It’s been a big year for Bitcoin adoption.

A handful of athletes and politicians now take a portion of their salaries in Bitcoin, El Salvador made it legal tender, and there are three Bitcoin futures ETFs trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. 

Still, the vast majority of the volume, about 75% of it, gets moved from one exchange to another, and a fairly small number of “rich” wallets control more than a quarter of the circulating supply, according to a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The report isn’t exactly new. It’s a working paper that was published on the NBER website in October using data collected through the end of June. But its findings got a bump this morning when the Wall Street Journal reported that “0.01% of Bitcoin holders control 27% of the currency in circulation.”

The top 1,000 investors control about 3 million, or 16%, of all circulating Bitcoin, and the top 10,000 investors own around 5 million, or 27%, of Bitcoin, according to authors Igor Makarov of the London School of Economics and Antoinette Schoar of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Source:decrypt.co