Bitcoin’s creation in 2009 has given the financial technology industry a spark to hold onto. Since then, thousands of cryptocurrencies have come onto the scene and with that, more people have started to buy and own it for themselves. With that being said, there are two important questions: how many people own cryptocurrency and how many people use cryptocurrency on a regular basis?
According to Statista, the number of blockchain wallet holders is steadily rising per quarter. That number has reached around 40 million at the end of Q3 of 2019.
Breaking it down
To unpack how many people own cryptocurrency in the world, let’s use Bitcoin as an example. Trying to find out how many people own Bitcoin isn’t as easy as it sounds. This is because it’s difficult to estimate the number of Bitcoin users and the wealth distribution isn’t evenly spread out. With all the data collected, there are a few things that we do know.
The first thing is that there are, at most, 40 million users—according to the Statistica data. However, this doesn’t give us a definitive estimate for how many users there are because most Bitcoin users have several bitcoin wallets and use multiple wallet addresses (to increase their privacy when trading bitcoin). This means that the number of Bitcoin owners has to—presumably—be less than 40 million.
Next, we know that the most popular centralized bitcoin exchange, Coinbase, has 13.3 million users, according to an article on Investopedia (June 2019). This means that there are at least 13 million Bitcoin users, setting the true amount of users from 13-40 million. But this is just a range since there are users that prefer other wallets and different platforms (especially for people in countries like Africa and Latin America—places where peer-to-peer marketplaces dominate the market.)
According to Chainalysis, the number of active Bitcoin users has actively increased (as of August 2018—meaning that the percentage could be much higher now). This is how Chainalysis broke down the number of users:
As you can see, investors hold a sizable amount of the coins as well as speculators. They take the majority of all bitcoin users.
Next, it’s important to discuss the countries in which Bitcoin is more popular. For this example, let’s use the American population. Currently, 11% of the American population owns Bitcoin—according to an article on Cointelegraph. Combined with all the emerging markets such as Venezuela, Brazil, and Africa, the number of Bitcoin owners around the world is definitely rising.
The math
At this point, it’s nearly impossible to accurately calculate the number of bitcoins owners around the world. The limited data that is presented makes it even more difficult. With all the data we could find, the number of Bitcoin owners around this world is probably at 25-35 million—and that number grows more and more every year. Out of the 40 million Blockchain wallets in use, some of those wallets are probably no longer in use and some people are using multiple wallets. Combined with the millions of that are using popular exchanges like Coinbase—25-35 million is a fair estimate. People can even argue that it could be much higher than that but that’s the thing—there is no definite way of finding the exact figure. For now, we’ll have to make do with the estimate.
