Bitcoin can be quite confusing for people who are just getting started with cryptocurrency. Bitcoin addresses appear as long sequences of seemingly random numbers and letters, which is a completely different experience compared to using traditional payment methods and banks.
One of the most common questions we see from new Bitcoin users if it’s possible to see who owns the most Bitcoin. The short answer is yes, you can see who owns the most Bitcoin, but the information is not complete.
Currently, the largest known owner of Bitcoin is the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange, but it’s also possible that the largest BTC holder is actually Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto.
Key highlights:
- Since all the information about Bitcoin addresses is public, you can easily see who owns the most Bitcoin, although the information is not 100% complete.
- Bitcoin block explorers usually provide a “rich list”, where you can see updated information about which addresses own the most Bitcoin.
- You can also use tools like Arkham Intelligence, which provide aggregated information about the Bitcoin holdings of people and organizations across multiple addresses.
- There is always some room for error when connecting real-world identities to Bitcoin addresses.
Before we show you how to see who owns the most Bitcoin, let’s quickly explain how Bitcoin works when it comes to the topic of privacy.
Bitcoin is not anonymous
All Bitcoin transactions and addresses are fully public, but the Bitcoin protocol itself doesn’t concern itself with real-world identities at all – you don’t need to provide any information about yourself to use Bitcoin.
However, this doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is anonymous. In fact, if anonymity and privacy are very important to you, Bitcoin is actually not a good choice and a privacy coin like Monero or Zcash will suit your needs much better. Privacy coins implement technologies that make it extremely difficult for anyone to access information about transactions.
Meanwhile, you can easily find all of the information pertaining to any Bitcoin transaction by using a Bitcoin block explorer such as Blockchain.com.
Even though this information does not include the real-world identity of the people or organizations involved in the transaction, it’s possible to obtain a lot of knowledge about a Bitcoin address by analyzing its transaction patterns and the addresses they interact with.
In many cases, people or organizations will publicly disclose that they control a specific Bitcoin address. For example, an exchange might disclose the addresses it uses to store its users’ Bitcoin, or a community member might provide an address that they use to accept donations.
If you use tools like Bitcoin block explorer, you’ll see that many addresses (particularly those holding a large number of BTC) are “tagged” with the identity of their owner. Of course, this information is not 100% reliable, unless the owner of the address publicly disclosed and proved their ownership.
How to see who owns the most Bitcoin?
The most straightforward way to see who owns the most Bitcoin is to go to a block explorer and find their “rich list” feature. Essentially, a Bitcoin rich list is a list of Bitcoin addresses that hold the largest amount of BTC.
One of the more popular Bitcoin rich lists is provided by BitInfoCharts. If we take a quick look, we can see that most of the largest Bitcoin addresses are controlled by cryptocurrency exchanges, which is not too surprising.
The 10 largest Bitcoin addresses as of October 17, 2024. Image source: BitInfoCharts.
It’s of course also possible (and quite common) that one person or organization splits their Bitcoin holdings across multiple addresses. Connecting multiple addresses to one owner is more difficult and has a larger probability of error than connecting a single address to one owner.
This is where platforms like Arkham Intelligence come in handy. Unlike standard block explorers, which only focus on single addresses, Arkham Intelligence also aggregates information about multiple addresses, allowing you to see how much BTC a person or organization holds across all the addresses identified as belonging to them.
If you want to see which people and organizations own the most Bitcoin (according to publicly available information), go to the Bitcoin section of Arkham Intelligence and find the “Addresses” section in the bottom left corner. Then, select “Group by Entity” to see the combined BTC holdings of various entities tracked by Arkham Intelligence.
At the time of writing, the largest confirmed holder of BTC is Coinbase, which holds close to 973,700 BTC (around $65 billion at current prices).
Although cryptocurrency exchanges and crypto asset managers dominate this list of the largest Bitcoin holders as well, we can see some interesting outliers. For example, the U.S. government controls over $13 billion worth of Bitcoin seized in various criminal investigations. Other governments also own sizeable amounts of Bitcoin.
It’s also interesting to see that Bitcoin addresses involved in major cryptocurrency hacks also own huge quantities of BTC – for example, an address involved in the notorious Mt. Gox hack controls nearly $3 billion worth of Bitcoin.
We can also see that MicroStrategy, a company that started aggressively purchasing BTC in 2020, is also among the largest Bitcoin holders.
We should also mention that it’s quite possible that the largest BTC owner overall is Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, who mined a very large amount of BTC in the early days of the cryptocurrency.
Although there are plenty of confirmed Satoshi Nakamoto addresses, it’s impossible to identify all of the addresses owned by Satoshi with 100% certainty. We know that Satoshi owns a very large amount of BTC, but exactly how much he owns is still a subject of debate. According to some estimates, he owns as much as 1.1 million BTC, which would mean he owns the most Bitcoin out of anyone.
The bottom line
Thanks to the public nature of the Bitcoin blockchain, you can get a lot of interesting information using tools that are available for free. Finding who owns the most Bitcoin is fairly easy, although you should always keep in mind that the information is not always fully complete and there’s usually some guesswork involved in connecting a Bitcoin address to a real-world person or organization.
If you’re interested in how to track crypto transactions made by large crypto holders, make sure to check out our article highlighting the best crypto whale trackers.
