How many people OWN Cryptocurrencies?

Cryptocurrencies have existed since 2009, the year the first cryptocurrency – Bitcoin – was launched. But it did not remain alone for long. Its success made wide waves and already in 2011 the first so-called altcoin (alternative to Bitcoin) was launched with Litecoin. Since then, thousands of different projects have entered the market.

Cryptocurrencies have already experienced several impressive boom phases. The last and by far the biggest towards the end of 2017 / beginning of 2018.

**FIG.1** Cryptocurrency total market cap in USD – TradingView.com

These phases have brought many people into the market. Today, almost every person has at least superficially heard of Bitcoin and Co. But how many are actually invested in cryptocurrencies?

Owners of cryptocurrencies can only be “estimated”

Although blockchains are transparent and it is easy to determine the addresses on which coins are located, you never know how many addresses a person owns. With Bitcoin, for example, it is common for a new Bitcoin address to be created for each transaction, and the remaining balance is then transferred to this address. Users can also create multiple addresses for other cryptocurrencies. Probably the best approach is via the user accounts of crypto exchanges. On crypto exchanges, you have to verify yourself and confirm your identity. Knowing approximately how many users crypto exchanges have, you can estimate the people involved with cryptocurrencies

Blockchain.info shows that around 20 million users were counted between 2016 and 2019. Among them, as mentioned, could be users who use multiple wallets. Statista.com shows 26 million blockchain users; here, too, multiple accounts per user are possible. Coinbase is more precise. They currently report around 13 million active users. With this data, one can make a rough estimate. If one includes other crypto exchanges such as Binance (which has a much higher number of users than Coinbase), the number of cryptocurrency owners should be between 20 and 40 million.