Published: December 10th, 2025
For most of Bitcoin's history, the number of addresses holding more than 0.1 BTC has been a reliable snapshot of grassroots adoption. It grew steadily from 2009 through 2023, but new figures suggest the accumulation trend has stalled, or even slipped into reverse.
A report from CoinGecko shows the tally peaked in December 2023 at just over 4.54m addresses. By December 2025, it had fallen to 4.44m, a modest decline in absolute terms, but unprecedented in duration. In percentage terms, the 2.3% drop is steeper than the 0.7% fall in addresses holding more than 0.01 BTC. It seems that the larger the balance, the more reluctant users are to keep it all in a single place.
In the context of a cooling crypto market, a two-year slide raises questions. Is Bitcoin's user base shrinking? Or is the network's address count simply becoming a less meaningful signpost of market participation?
On first pass, the data points to a shrinking base of individuals with a few thousand dollars' worth of Bitcoin. But appearance and reality may not align perfectly.
The early days of Bitcoin were defined by DIY enthusiasts using laptops and hardware wallets. Today thousands of exchanges facilitate custody. Funds, ETFs, and structured products dominate flows. Companies hold BTC on behalf of millions. Pension products and derivatives provide exposure without ever touching the base layer.
That complexity obscures the count of genuine holders. A single exchange address may represent hundreds of thousands of users; a single user may, with equal ease, maintain hundreds of addresses. Untangling that commingled activity is difficult. Even the most sophisticated analytics firms can infer patterns but cannot definitively map addresses to individuals.
The result is a paradox: a declining count of larger BTC addresses may reflect changing behaviour rather than thinning participation. Far from signalling decline, it may point to a user base becoming more sophisticated.
If fewer wallets hold more than 0.1 BTC, it may simply be because no one needs to store it that way anymore.
Hardware wallets remain a popular security tool, but they no longer dominate private storage. Investors who want exposure without operational headaches can now choose from a zoo of exchange-traded vehicles that satisfy everything from retirement-account requirements to institutional mandates. A 0.1-BTC saver in 2015 would have had little alternative but to self-custody. A 0.1-BTC saver in 2025 may very well hold the asset via a brokerage account.
Self-custodians, meanwhile, have grown savvier. Standard operational practices now encourage dispersing holdings across multiple addresses to reduce exposure to theft, loss, or poor privacy hygiene. Extended public keys make such distribution trivial. Wallets increasingly ship with “decoy” layers, mimicking a set of Matryoshka dolls that conceal the real stash. More advanced users employ XOR-based seed splitting or multi-signature arrangements to reduce single-point risks.
From the point of view of the blockchain, these practices look like fragmentation: one address becomes ten, and then twenty, and so on.
If structural quirks explain part of the decline, market sentiment may account for the rest. Bitcoin's recent wobble has left analysts uneasily scanning their charts for signs of rther weakness.
Forecasters at XYO, a blockchain analytics firm, warn that Bitcoin could slip below $50,000 in the coming weeks. The trigger, they suggest, may lie not on-chain but in Washington. The Federal Reserve is set to announce whether it will trim interest rates, a move that typically raises appetite for riskier assets. Even so, XYO notes that fear gauges have tipped into “extreme” territory, a mood rarely associated with soaring prices.
Bitcoin currently trades just shy of $90,000, but the tone is cautious. The firm argues that the market structure leaves “clear magnets” (price levels where demand tends to reappear) near $82,000 and $78,000. Should those fail to attract buyers, a slide into the low $70,000s “is entirely possible.” In thin liquidity, they add, even a brief plunge below $50,000 “cannot be ruled out.”
Options markets paint a subtler picture. Data from basedmoney, a derivatives tracking firm, show that for contracts expiring on December 26th, the heaviest concentration of put positions sits at $85,000. Traders expect turbulence but not collapse.
Even so, analysts remain reserved. Bitcoin's uptrend, they argue, is “still broken.” Only a decisive move above $100,000 would restore the bullish structure that carried the asset higher earlier in the year.
Should the price fail to regain six figures, “another sweep of lower support remains possible,” they note. Firm consolidation above $100,000 would sharply reduce the odds of revisiting prices under $70,000. Until then, the market sits in a precarious middle ground.
A less discussed headwind is the recent outflow from Bitcoin ETFs, a reversal from the wave of inflows that powered earlier rallies. Add rising inflation expectations, and the asset finds itself facing tighter financial conditions just as investor confidence shows signs of fraying.
What should crypto traders make of a two-year decline in 0.1-BTC wallets? Some will see it as a sign that Bitcoin's retail appeal is eroding and small holders are throwing in the towel. But a more measured reading suggests the metric is simply losing relevance.
Address counts were once a helpful gauge of Bitcoin's adoption curve because they approximated wallet usage in a simpler era. But the network's evolution has outpaced those proxies. Institutional custody, exchange aggregation, ETFs, security layering, and multi-address management distort the relationship between addresses and actual individuals.
Bitcoin continues to spread, but in ways that old metrics struggle to capture. A shrinking cohort of large-balance addresses may not reflect fading interest, just an environment where users no longer store value the way early adopters once did.
The technology has matured; the behaviours around it have diversified. BTC's ecosystem has become too large and too complex to fit neatly inside a single on-chain statistic.
