Bitcoin Rich List: Biggest Bitcoin Holders in 2024

Bitcoin is the king of cryptocurrency, boasting a market cap valuation of more than $1.2 trillion. With this kind of valuation, it’s not too surprising that the balances of the biggest Bitcoin holders are truly jaw-dropping — we’re talking about billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin per wallet.  In this article, we will take a look at the Bitcoin rich list and try to identify the 10 biggest Bitcoin holders. Wherever possible, we’ll provide additional insights about each address.Without further ado, let’s check out the top 10 holders from the Bitcoin rich list and learn a bit more about these Bitcoin whales.Data as of April 19, 2024. Source: BitinfochartsThe distribution of the Bitcoin supply by holder size. Image source: GlassnodeHoldings: 248,597 BTCDollar value: $16.1 billionAddress: 34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHoCNxv4TwseoThe biggest Bitcoin holder is a wallet controlled by the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. Binance is the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume and user count, so it’s not too surprising that it has the world’s biggest Bitcoin wallet. At the time of writing, this wallet holds a massive 248,597 BTC, which is more than 1.2% of all Bitcoin in circulation. It has been active since October 2018. As a cold wallet, this wallet is used to hold the Bitcoin belonging to Binance’s customers for longer periods of time. The wallet rarely makes outgoing transactions — at the time of writing, the wallet most recently sent out a Bitcoin transaction about 8 months ago. However, when the wallet does send Bitcoin, the amounts are substantial, as high as 21,600 BTC in one case. Holdings: 180,010 BTCDollar value: $11.7 billionAddress: bc1qgdjqv0av3q56jvd82tkdjpy7gdp9ut8tlqmgrpmv24sq90ecnvqqjwvw97The second-largest Bitcoin holder is another cold wallet, this time belonging to the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. Bitfinex has was founded already in 2012, and has remained a pillar of the cryptocurrency exchange industry despite often being the subject of controversy (for example, the hack in 2016 and the criticisms of the Bitfinex-affiliated USDT stablecoin).This wallet exhibits a similar pattern to the Binance cold wallet featured at #1 on our list. It very rarely sends out any of its Bitcoin, and when it does, the transactions are large. Occasionally, the wallet is funded with large incoming transfers—for example, it received a massive 50,000 BTC transaction in February 2020. Holdings: 136,295 BTC Dollar value: $8.8 billionAddress: bc1ql49ydapnjafl5t2cp9zqpjwe6pdgmxy98859v2The third-largest Bitcoin wallet belongs to the Robinhood trading platform, according to data from blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence. However, as of August 28, 2023, Robinhood hasn’t publicly confirmed that it owns the wallet. According to Arkham Intelligence, the wallet is actually managed by Jump Trading, who is acting as a custodian for the funds.The wallet began receiving a series of large transactions starting in May of 2023. In each transaction, the wallet received between 1,600 and 1,900 BTC. The wallet stopped receiving these large transactions on June 30, and has only been receiving very small transactions since. So far, the wallet has only made one outgoing transaction, sending a modest sum of 0.051 BTC in May of 2023.Holdings: 94,643 BTCDollar value: $6.1 billionAddress: bc1qazcm763858nkj2dj986etajv6wquslv8uxwcztThis wallet is currently under the control of U.S. federal authorities and contains BTC that was stolen from the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange in 2016. The wallet first became active in February of 2022, right around the time Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather R. Morgan were charged for allegedly conspiring to launder the Bitcoin that was stolen in the hack.All of the large transactions that funded this wallet were conducted on February 1, 2022. Since then, the wallet has only been receiving transactions containing negligible amounts of Bitcoin, and the wallet has never sent out any BTC so far.We’ll likely see this wallet make some very interesting transactions in the future as the investigation into the Bitfinex hack and the prosecution of the alleged launderers of the stolen BTC continues.Holdings: 79,957 BTCDollar value: $5.2 billionAddress: 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uFThis wallet is controlled by someone who hacked the now-defunct Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange. In August of 2023, former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles tweeted the following:“I hereby certify that the 79956.55 Bitcoins sent to the 1Feex address on March 1st, 2011, were transferred without proper authorization from MtGox’s original Bitcoin wallet and are considered stolen property belonging to the MtGox estate for the profit of the MtGox creditors.”I hereby certify that the 79956.55 Bitcoins sent to the 1Feex address on March 1st 2011 were transferred without proper authorization from MtGox’s original bitcoind wallet, and are considered stolen property belonging to the MtGox estate for the profit of the MtGox creditors.Apart from this massive transaction of 79,956 stolen BTC, the wallet has only been receiving very small transactions since. Interestingly, this wallet has yet to send out any Bitcoin despite being created all the way back in 2011.Holdings: 78,317 BTCDollar value: $5.1 billionAddress: bc1q8yj0herd4r4yxszw3nkfvt53433thk0f5qst4gIt is not clear who owns the sixth-largest Bitcoin wallet. The wallet first became active on March 24, 2024, when a whale tracked under the sequence of letters and numbers of “37XuVSEp” transferred 94,504 BTC to two wallets. Breaking: A new Bitcoin whale wallet move has been tracked – the $5b payment has created a new whale wallet:

Whale 37XuVSEp accumulated 94,504.03 $BTC since 2019 ? ($6.1b)

The wallet sent all 94,504.03 $BTC to 2 wallets,

87501 to bc1qct3mys and 7453 to bc1qsetvcw
then they… pic.twitter.com/mOdOYlJQ9fAfter the initial transaction, the wallet remained mostly dormant, receiving only small amounts of BTC periodically, probably from random Bitcoin holders looking to chase some clout for being associated with one of the largest BTC addresses.Holdings: 75,354 BTCDollar value: $4.9 billionAddress: bc1qjasf9z3h7w3jspkhtgatgpyvvzgpa2wwd2lr0eh5tx44reyn2k7sfc27a4According to Arkham Intelligence, one of the leading blockchain research companies, the 7th largest Bitcoin wallet belongs to none other than Tether, the company behind the highly popular USDT stablecoin. The wallet received several transactions involving thousands of BTC from Bitfinex’s hot wallet account.Holdings: 75,177 BTCDollar value: $4.9 billionAddress: 3E97AjYaCq9QYnfFMtBCYiCEsN956Rvpj2The second largest Bitcoin wallet controlled by Binance is a cold wallet holding more than 75,000 BTC. It first became active in March 2024, when Binance transferred nearly $5 billion worth of Bitcoin to the address. Since then, the wallet has been completely dormant.Holdings: 73,047 BTCDollar value: $4.7 billionAddress: 3M219KR5vEneNb47ewrPfWyb5jQ2DjxRP6Binance’s 3rd largest cold wallet for Bitcoin dates back to November 2018. The wallet has received several major deposits over the years, along with quite significant withdrawals. As of writing this article, the address is home to more than 73,000 BTC. However, the total volume of hands that were changed using the wallet was 4,539,816 BTC, about a fourth of all Bitcoin in circulation.Holdings: 69,370 BTCDollar value: $4.5 billionAddress: bc1qa5wkgaew2dkv56kfvj49j0av5nml45x9ek9hz6This wallet contains funds that originated from the Silk Road, a dark web marketplace where illicit goods and services were sold in exchange for Bitcoin. However, the coins in this wallet were not seized directly from the operators of the Silk Road marketplace. The funds were instead seized from an unnamed hacker, who has been referred to as “Individual X” in court documents. Individual X hacked Silk Road between 2012 and 2013, stealing large amounts of BTC from the illicit marketplace. The hacker agreed to forfeit the stolen BTC to U.S. authorities in November of 2020. As we can see, the Bitcoin rich list is quite fascinating. Of course, there are wallets used by leading crypto exchanges such as Binance and Bitfinex, but there are also wallets associated with unfortunate events from the history of Bitcoin, most notably exchange hacks.If you want to learn more about Bitcoin, make sure to check out our article exploring if Bitcoin is a good investment or not.The largest single Bitcoin wallet, which has more than 248,000 BTC, is controlled by the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. However, the largest holder of Bitcoin overall is likely investment company Grayscale, which holds more than 306,000 BTC as part of its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust investment product.In addition, we can’t forget Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the inventor of Bitcoin. According to some estimates, Satoshi could have more than 1 million BTC, although more conservative estimates place his holdings at between 600,000 and 700,000 BTC.There are more than 1,000,000 addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain that own at least 1 Bitcoin. Still, this question is impossible to answer precisely since the same person or company can own as many Bitcoin addresses as they please.