What is an owner here?
An owner is a bundle of addresses the chain’s own evidence links together. It is not a person and it is not an account. One person can show up as several owners, and one owner can be a business with thousands of customers behind it.
Grouping matters because an address is free to make, and most wallets make a new one for every payment. Add up addresses and call the total holders, and you have counted labels rather than people. That count always comes out too high.
- Addresses ever seen
- 1.55 billion
- every address the chain has ever paid, grouped or not
- Addresses the chain lets us group
- 430 million (27.7%)
- the ones that ever revealed a link to another address
- Owners they group into
- 90 million
- bundles of addresses, not people and not accounts
Counted at block 969,289, 1 Oct 2026.
Where does the evidence come from?
From the Bitcoin chain itself, worked out by Maketo, starting with the first block in 2009. Nothing here is copied from another tracker.
A block is only read once about 100 more blocks sit on top of it. The newest blocks can still be replaced by the network, and a block that could still vanish should not be able to join two owners.
No address is published anywhere on this site. What the site publishes from the grouping is counts, totals and, on the leaderboard, anonymous track records.
Which rule does most of the grouping?
Spent together. When one payment spends coins from several addresses at once, whoever made it held the keys to all of them. You cannot spend from an address without its key, so this is evidence the owner wrote into the chain, not a guess about behaviour.
Not every such payment counts. Some are built by several people on purpose, and the kinds listed further down are turned away rather than trusted.
What is the second rule?
The leftover sent back to the payer. You rarely hold the exact amount you want to pay, so your wallet sends the rest back to an address of your own. Find the leftover and you have linked the payer’s addresses too.
This one is a judgement rather than a fact, so it is hard to trigger. A leftover is only linked when at least two separate signs apply and every one of them points at the same single output:
- It is the same kind of address as the coins that were spent.
- The payment is a rounder number than the leftover, by at least two more zeros, the way a person picks a round amount to pay.
- It is smaller than the smallest coin that was spent.
A never-used address can help narrow a choice but can never make one on its own. Fewer links we can stand behind beat more links we cannot, because a wrong link welds two owners into one.
What does the grouping refuse to link?
- Payments several people build together to hide who paid whom, whether they follow a known pattern or simply pay out three or more equal amounts.
- Payments shaped like a PayJoin, where the person being paid adds a coin of their own so the payment looks like one person’s. This refusal is deliberately wide, so it also turns away ordinary payments that only look like one.
- Payments that spend from more than 20 separate addresses at once. Newer ways of mixing coins cannot be told apart from them, so they are left alone rather than guessed at.
- Lightning channel closes, and coins locked to two or more keys. Shared control is not one owner.
- Newly mined coins, and coins held in a kind of address that cannot be read.
- Long chains of payments peeled off one shrinking balance. They are measured, but they group nothing: an early version linked the people who paid to the people they were paying.
- Wallet software habits. Millions of separate wallets share the same software, and same software is not same owner.
How are businesses kept apart from holders?
Exchanges, fund custodians, other custodians, company treasury custodians and other businesses that hold coins for other people are marked from published records, each checked by a person before it is used. A business’s group is never counted as a holder, because the coins in it belong to its customers.
A group that two businesses both claim is credited to neither, and is still kept out of the holder figures. A business that no published record reaches is counted as a holder, because nothing on the chain says otherwise.
Some pages, such as each exchange’s page, name the business a group belongs to. That name always comes from a published record, never from behaviour alone, and no page names a private person. Reports of a theft and sanctions lists are never taken as evidence of who controls a wallet, and wallets holding coins a government seized are not separated from holders.
How much of the chain can be grouped?
Only addresses that ever revealed a link can be grouped, and most never do. An address that received coins and never moved them says nothing about its neighbours, so it stays on its own. The counts near the top of this page say how large that grouped share is.
The same goes for coins. Coins that arrive and sit still stay outside the grouping until they move, so the owner figures describe a minority of all bitcoin, and every page that uses them says which part it describes.
How is the method graded?
The passing marks were written down on 4 August 2026, before the first full measurement existed, from what the chain must look like if the method is working rather than from what the results turned out to be. Among them: the method may answer “cannot tell” on no more than one payment in twenty, and it must be allowed to learn from at least 80% of the payments that spend from more than one address.
That second mark is not met yet. The reason is a fact about the chain rather than a fault: payments shaped like a PayJoin are refused rather than guessed at, and that refusal is deliberately wide. Grouping less is the safer failure, because a missed link costs reach while a wrong one joins strangers.
Which parts are judgement rather than fact?
- Spent together is a fact the owner wrote into the chain. Which of those payments to refuse is a judgement, and the refusals above are the choices made.
- The leftover rule is a judgement, which is why it needs two signs that agree.
- Which groups are businesses rests on published records a person checked.
What will the grouping not claim?
- A group is a wallet, not a person.
- Grouping alone never says whose wallet it is.
- The largest group may be one very big business moving its own coins, or several owners joined by payments that only looked like one wallet. Nothing here says which.
- Once joined, a group is never split apart again, so a wrong link stays until the method changes.
- The same key written in two address formats counts as two addresses.
How often does it update?
Once a day, with each day’s new blocks added. Readings of owners over time settle about three days behind the calendar: a block counts once about 100 others sit on top of it, and a block’s clock can run up to two hours fast, so a day is only closed once the chain is two full days past it. The counts on this page are made at one block, and they say which.
Version
Current method: version 1. Meaningful changes to how addresses are grouped will be noted on this page.
In short
This page explains how a count was made. It is not advice to buy or sell anything, it does not say who owns any wallet, and it is not a prediction of where the price is going.
