Galaxy Research has classified about 11.1 million bitcoin as unattributed, leaving more than half of the mined supply without a known owner in its October ownership records.
Galaxy's snapshot covered approximately 20.1 million BTC, with 55.1% held at addresses the firm could not link to named individuals or organizations. The gap remains even as exchanges, asset managers and corporate treasuries account for a growing part of the market. Researchers build ownership labels from transaction records and public disclosures, but neither source identifies every wallet holder.
Self-Custody Remains Common Despite Institutional Buying
Alex Thorn, Galaxy's head of research, said the figures suggest that many holders still keep bitcoin outside exchanges and other centralized services. In an October 14 post on X, he wrote that "still a ton of bitcoin (maybe even most) is held by individuals in self-custody."
Under self-custody, a holder controls the private keys needed to spend the bitcoin. Exchange customers, by comparison, usually rely on a company to manage those keys. However, analysts cannot determine who controls an address without other evidence connecting it to an owner.
Xapo Bank joined the discussion and pointed to the long history of individual participation in Bitcoin. "Retail have been here for over a decade. Everyone else is still catching up," the bank wrote in response to Thorn. Its comment addressed the possible role of retail investors, rather than establishing who controls the unidentified coins.
Unattributed Bitcoin Is Not Necessarily Held by Retail Investors
Galaxy's category measures what researchers cannot identify, not how much bitcoin individuals own. A wallet with no public name may belong to a long-term holder, but it may also belong to a firm that has not disclosed its addresses. Several wallets can also belong to the same holder. Transfers between those addresses may not reveal whether a person or an institution controls them.
The total may include coins whose owners have lost their private keys or died without passing on access information. Such bitcoin can remain visible on the blockchain even if nobody can move it. An inactive address, however, does not prove that its coins have been lost.
Other balances could sit with private trading desks, investment firms or custodians using multiple addresses. Some institutions hold assets for clients, making it harder to distinguish the custodian from the people whose money it manages. Galaxy did not provide a verified split between lost coins, retail holdings and unidentified institutional balances.
Exchanges and Bitcoin ETFs Account for Part of Identified Supply
The firm's ownership map assigns the remaining roughly 45% of mined bitcoin to known entities or recognizable groups. Exchanges accounted for about 17.9% of the supply, while ETFs and funds represented 6.0%, according to the October data.
The identified groups also include governments, miners and companies. These percentages describe Galaxy's October snapshot, rather than a permanent division of the supply.
Galaxy separately attributed about 1,123,658 BTC to the Patoshi mining pattern, equal to around 5.6% of mined supply. Researchers associate this cluster of early Bitcoin blocks with one miner, whom many believe to be Satoshi Nakamoto. The pattern does not establish that person's identity or prove who can access the coins today.
Public Bitcoin records show balances and transfers, but they do not automatically show who controls each address. Galaxy's figures therefore describe the limits of current wallet identification, rather than a confirmed division of bitcoin between retail and institutional owners.
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