As banks buy up bitcoins, who else are the ‘Bitcoin whales’?

The price of Bitcoin is close to its all-time high, thanks in large part to US finance giants.

Investment banks like Grayscale, BlackRock and Fidelity, are pouring billions of dollars into buying the volatile digital asset.

In the last few weeks, these powerful institutions have become so called ‘Bitcoin whales’.

Because of Bitcoin’s system there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins.

19 million have been created, but many are already accounted for and probably off the market.

So what other organisations or individuals are Bitcoin whales, and what does the shift in wealth mean for the digital currency that was originally created as a peer-to-peer internet money?

The figures below are estimates gathered from direct research and published information, but should give a good overview of how Bitcoin is distributed. Our data collection ended on the morning of 29 February.

Estimates for how many bitcoins are lost forever vary between three million to as many as six million. Bitcoins can be lost because people forget the details of their digital wallets – there is no ‘customer support’ in Bitcoin. Just ask James Howells, who lost 8,000 bitcoins on a discarded hard drive in Wales.

Some of these lost bitcoins might also come from abandoned criminal proceeds left untouched. According to crypto-investigators at Elliptic, 3.15 million bitcoins have been dormant for 10 years or more. Some analysts – like those from investigators Chainalysis – say Bitcoin that hasn’t been moved in five years could also be lost too. So millions more bitcoins could potentially be added to the lost pile.

A loose estimate that’s often agreed upon is 3.5 million. But 1.1 million of those dormant coins are likely to belong to the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, so we can take that portion out of the equation. A conservative estimate for lost coins therefore is about 2.4 million, or 11% of all bitcoins.

Cryptocurrency exchanges act like banks for crypto-users. You can exchange your traditional money like dollars or pounds for Bitcoin and other digital tokens. K33 researchers estimate that about 2.3 million bitcoins are kept by exchanges, either on behalf of customers or as float. Binance is the world’s largest exchange and is estimated to have about 550,000 bitcoins – followed by Bitfinex (403,000), Coinbase (386,000), Robinhood (146,000) and OKX (126,000). In total it is thought exchanges hold about 11% of all bitcoins.

Leaving your coins on an exchange can go wrong though, for example with the collapse of FTX which left customers without access to their coins. Some Bitcoin purists are also uneasy about how a reliance on large and increasingly regulated and legally compliant exchanges goes against the anti-establishment ethos of Bitcoin.

A Bitcoin whale is someone who holds more than 10,000 bitcoins in their digital wallet. The website Bitinfocharts uses public blockchain records to keep a Bitcoin Rich List of the 100 richest wallets, and there are about 80 wallets with 10,000 coins or more, whose owners are unknown. Owning one of these wallets would make you a billionaire. Some of them might be the wallets of people or organisations which appear elsewhere in this graph but we will never know, unless a researcher makes the link or the whale outs themselves. A loose estimate is that large whales account for about 8% of all bitcoins.

The way that Bitcoin was invented means there can only ever be 21 million coins. Every coin has to be mined using a network of volunteer computers around the world. These computers – often owned by large Bitcoin mining companies – act like high-tech accountants checking and securing the record of Bitcoin transactions. In return for the work, the computers are automatically rewarded with Bitcoins.

Over time, the amount of coins given out as part of the mining reward is automatically reduced and in April it will halve again, squeezing the supply of new coins further. There are still about 7% of coins yet to be mined, and it is estimated that the last Bitcoin will be created in 2140.

The anonymous creator of Bitcoin holds an estimated 1.1 million bitcoins in wallets that were the first to be created in 2009. None of the coins have been moved in years, and no-one knows who Satoshi is – or even if he/ she/ they are still alive. If they are still alive – and estimates are correct – then this would make Satoshi Nakamoto roughly the 22nd richest person in the world. This stash is about 5% of all bitcoins.

In January, US financial authorities allowed…