More than half of all bitcoin can't be tied to a known owner, Galaxy found

Galaxy Research placed some 11.1 million bitcoin, a 55% share of the 20.1 million or so coins mined to date, in its unattributed category in October, according to CoinDesk. The coins sit at addresses the firm has been unable to tie to any identified owner, whether an exchange, a fund or a government.

A bitcoin address plays the role of an account number at a bank, but on the network's public ledger, according to CoinDesk. Anyone can view the balance held at a given address, yet nothing in the ledger reveals who owns it. Research firms such as Galaxy work to put identities behind addresses by following wallets already tied to large holders like exchanges and funds.

Alex Thorn, Galaxy’s head of research, said the number points to self-custody being common, according to CoinDesk. Self-custody means holders control the keys to their bitcoin themselves, rather than entrusting the coins to a fund or exchange.

"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, still a ton of bitcoin (maybe even most) is held by individuals in self-custody," Thorn wrote on X $TWTR.

Xapo Bank, a bank that centers its business on bitcoin, responded to Thorn's post, according to CoinDesk. "Retail have been here for over a decade. Everyone else still catching up," the bank wrote.

CoinDesk noted that not all of the unattributed total is necessarily owned by individuals who are saving it over the long haul. The figure may cover coins that are effectively gone because their owners lost track of their keys or died. It may also include early-era coins that were mined by people other than the miner behind the Patoshi pattern, a cluster of early blocks that researchers tie to one miner, believed to be bitcoin's anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Some of the coins could belong to institutions Galaxy has not identified, including funds, companies and over-the-counter desks, meaning intermediaries that set up big private bitcoin deals outside of exchanges. Custody arrangements that divide holdings among numerous addresses could also be more difficult to trace, according to CoinDesk.

The other 45% has names attached, according to CoinDesk. Those holders include exchanges, exchange-traded funds led by BlackRock $BLK and the U.S. government. The largest single holder is "Satoshi Nakamoto (Patoshi Pattern)" with 1,123,658 bitcoin, a group Galaxy counts under the Satoshi-era miner pattern.