Galaxy: 55% of the bitcoin supply has no known owner

Galaxy Research has gone through the ledger and put a number on how much bitcoin nobody can name an owner for: 11.1 million coins, sitting in addresses that do not belong to any exchange, fund, government or company the firm could identify. We checked the denominator ourselves at block 973,219: 20,103,787 coins have been mined, so the unattributed pile is 55.2% of the bitcoin supply. At Monday's price of $80,472 it is worth about $893bn.

“More than half of all BTC supply is sitting in addresses with no known attribution despite all the institutionalization and centralized ownership over the years.”

— Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy, https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/10/26/over-11-million-btc-can-t-be-linked-to-any-known-owner-even-after-wall-street-buying

That reading is one of several the same number supports, and Galaxy says so itself. The 11.1 million also contains coins whose owners died or lost their keys, holdings of funds, companies and over-the-counter desks the firm has not matched to a name, and custody setups that deliberately spread coins across many addresses. Xapo Bank read the same figure as proof that retail has been here over a decade. All three readings fit, which is the honest problem with the measurement.

One dormant wallet, an eighth of the known side

The known 45% is about 9.0 million coins and includes the exchanges, BlackRock's ETF, the US government and the address pattern attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. That last one is 1,123,658 coins on its own, 5.59% of everything mined and roughly $90bn at Monday's price, and it has never moved. One dormant wallet is more than an eighth of the identified side of the ledger.

What the figure does settle is a claim made loudly for two years. Wall Street has bought a great deal of bitcoin, and after all of it the majority of the supply still sits outside anything with a compliance department. Galaxy's October snapshot puts institutional and state holdings, every identified exchange balance included, below half.

What the number cannot tell you

The caveat worth keeping is about direction. Attribution improves over time: analytics firms label more addresses every year, so the unattributed share falls partly because research gets better rather than because coins move. A year-on-year comparison of this number measures two things at once, and only one of them is the market. We made the same point last week about reading bitcoin against gold over a single year: the frame does as much work as the data. Here the frame is a label on a wallet, and 11.1 million coins have never needed one.

Informational material, not investment advice. Galaxy's 11.1 million is an attribution estimate rather than a count of owners, and the supply, price and percentages above are our own measurements taken on 26 October 2026.