Who Holds Bitcoin
Bitcoin keeps the most complete public financial record ever built. It cannot say who is in it. Everything anyone knows about who owns bitcoin came from somewhere else.
Who Holds Bitcoin
On the twentieth of December, 2020, a file of customer records was published on a forum used for trading stolen data. It held names, home addresses and phone numbers for about 272,000 buyers of a device for storing bitcoin. Letters followed, asking for about a thousand dollars in bitcoin. None of it required breaking bitcoin, because bitcoin's record stores amounts, times and addresses, and an address works more like a numbered locker than a name.
The episode above works through what follows from that: why counting owners is harder than counting addresses, why two careful 2026 surveys of American adults disagree by eleven points, and what asking people buys you that the record cannot. The three figures below are that survey layer, and they carry the caveat that matters most.
| Region | Owners | Share |
|---|
Triple-A cryptocurrency ownership data for 2024. Triple-A is a crypto payments company that publishes ownership estimates. Regional figures sum to 549.9 million; Triple-A's headline global total is 562 million, and the roughly 12 million difference is unallocated in the published breakdown. Shares are computed against the 549.9 million that is regionally attributed.
Europe sitting below North America is the number most people get wrong. It counts owners rather than money moved. On the money-moved measure, Chainalysis put European on-chain value received at roughly 2.6 trillion dollars for the year to June 2025, ahead of Asia-Pacific at 2.36 trillion and North America at 2.2 trillion. Fewer European owners, larger European transactions.
| Age | Share |
|---|
Security.org, 2026 Cryptocurrency Adoption and Sentiment Report. 992 US adults surveyed, of whom 293 owned crypto; every owner figure here rests on those 293. Figures are as published and sum to 99 percent because of rounding; the wedge angles are drawn against that 99.
Roughly two thirds of US crypto owners are between 30 and 59. That is not because young people are less interested. Pew found 26 percent of adults under 30 had used crypto, against 28 percent of those aged 30 to 49 and 10 percent of those 50 and over. There are more middle-aged Americans, and more of them have money left over at the end of the month.
| Gender | Owners | Share |
|---|
Donut: Triple-A 2024 global ownership, 343 million men and 219 million women of 562 million owners. Tiles: Pew Research Center, American Trends Panel, 8,512 US adults surveyed 20–26 January 2026, measuring adults who have ever invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrency.
The donut and the tiles are two different measurements and it is worth keeping them apart. The donut is a split, the share of owners who are men. The tiles are a rate, the share of all men who have used crypto. A US man is roughly two and a half times as likely to have used it as a US woman, and the widest gap in Pew's table sits in the middle of working life.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from a named, dated study. Two of the publishers sell services in this market rather than researching it independently, which is stated here rather than left for the reader to find.
- Pew Research Center, American Trends Panel, 8,512 US adults surveyed 20–26 January 2026.
- Security.org, 2026 Cryptocurrency Adoption and Sentiment Report, 992 US adults of whom 293 owned crypto.
- Triple-A, 2024 global ownership data. Triple-A is a crypto payments company.
- River, Bitcoin Ownership Report 2025, cited in the audio. River is an American company that sells bitcoin services.
- Chainalysis, 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, covering July 2024 to June 2025.
Part of Bitcoin: A Money Story, the eight-part series on where bitcoin came from and how it works.