Key Takeaways

• Launched in 2009, Bitcoin is the first and remains the most successful blockchain-based cryptocurrency globally.
• The creator of Bitcoin under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto is thought to be the largest Bitcoin holder. 
• The Winklevoss twins, institutional investors like MicroStrategy, and governments like the United States and China are just a few examples of other well-known Bitcoin millionaires.

As of June 6, 2023, Bitcoin (BTC) had a market capitalization  of $498,85 billion, making it the largest cryptocurrency but who are the biggest Bitcoin holders and how much are they worth – was always interesting to the public. 

At the height of the crypto boom in April 2021, there were more than 1.3 million active BTC-holding addresses, up from around 1,000 in July 2010. By 14 March 2023, there were more than one million BTC holders. However, it’s not only individuals who are hoarding Bitcoin for their private reserves.

For a long time, the notion that publicly traded firms would purchase Bitcoin for their reserves was ridiculed. The most popular cryptocurrency was viewed as being too unstable and fringe for any major firm to use.

The purchase of Bitcoin over the past two years by a number of significant institutional investors has effectively ended that taboo. 

Since 2009, Bitcoin’s meteoric rise has produced a surprise and diverse group of millionaires (and billionaires). Who, however, are the biggest Bitcoin holders? Since wallet addresses are anonymous in the sense that they are not linked to the name of the account owner, it is difficult to say with certainty who has the most Bitcoin. The only way to know is if the owner has made their assets known.

Individuals With the Largest Bitcoin Holdings (in no particular order):

• Winklevoss twins

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, also known as the Winklevoss twins, co-founded Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange back in 2014. The exchange currently handles roughly $40 million in trades  each day.

Tyler, who works as Gemini’s CEO, and Cameron, who works as its president, are famous for claiming that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen their concept for a social network.

They started hoarding Bitcoin using a portion of the $65 million court settlement they had with the Facebook CEO. Back in 2013, the twins stated that they had purchased 1% of the whole Bitcoin supply. The failure of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange in November 2022, however, caused the Winklevoss twins to lose more than 60% of their Bitcoin wealth. 

• Michael Saylor

Michael Saylor is the founder of business analytics software company MicroStrategy, and has served as its CEO until early August 2022 before becoming its chairman. Saylor, one of the most well-known Internet bubble executives, became a multibillionaire in the late 1990s as a result of his ownership of MicroStrategy. The SEC then filed accounting allegations against Saylor’s company, and fined it with $11 million in penalties. The company’s stock value crashed as a result of reissuing the accurate financial data, and Saylor’s net worth decreased by $6 billion.

Saylor is a huge Bitcoin advocate  calling it “a bank in cyberspace, run by incorruptible software, offering a global, affordable, simple, & secure savings account to billions of people that don’t have the option or desire to run their own hedge fund.” Recently he has become one of the few Bitcoin maximalists to publicly embrace Ordinals. Both, Saylor and MicroStrategy are huge Bitcoin investors.

• Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name of the person or organization who was credited with creating Bitcoin. The whole creator’s history is obscured by mystery as his identity has never been made public. However, information on a profile with The P2P Foundation indicates that they turned 48 on April 5.

Before the first Bitcoin was mined, Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”  to a cryptography mailing group. The article, which was released on October 31, 2008, described a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol that was secure in terms of cryptography. Satoshi Nakamoto, referred to Bitcoin as a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” that “would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution or any intermediary.” He is said to be the largest individual Bitcoin holder and was purportedly the first miner of the currency.

• Tim Draper

American venture capitalist and founder of many companies under his name, Timothy Cook Draper, is known as a huge Bitcoin proponent. His most well-known investments are in FinTech firms like Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase, Robinhood, Tesla, Hotmail, Skype, etc. He paid $18.7 million, or approximately $632 per coin, in 2014 to purchase 29,656 Bitcoins that U.S. Marshals had seized from the shuttered Silk Road black market. Draper supports decentralization and is against Government control.

Publicly Traded Companies With the Largest Bitcoin Holdings (in no particular order):

• Tesla (TSLA)

American multinational automotive and clean energy company Tesla , headed by multibillionaire Elon Musk, bought its first batch of Bitcoin back in February 2021. The company explained it bought the Bitcoin for “more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on cash.”

Afterward, Tesla started accepting payments in Bitcoin in exchange for its products, becoming the first major automaker to do so. Nowadays, Tesla is investing in other cryptocurrencies as well, including Dogecoin.

• MicroStrategy (MSTR)

In August 2020, MicroStrategy  purchased its first batch of Bitcoin, citing concerns that the epidemic, global financial stimulus programs, and political unpredictability would cause the U.S. currency to depreciate. In a statement , CEO Michael Saylor then said, “This investment reflects our belief that Bitcoin, as the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, is a dependable store of value and an attractive investment asset with more long-term appreciation potential than holding cash.”

• Hut 8 Mining Corp (HUT)

An infrastructure firm for mining digital assets, Hut 8 Mining Corp  (HUT) is situated in North America. The business runs cloud and colocation data center facilities in Canada and caters to business clients looking for computing services. Hut 8 Mining announced in February 2023 that it would join forces with US Bitcoin  to become Hut 8 Corp., also known as “New Hut.” Following the acquisition, six facilities totaling about 825 megawatts will purportedly be available to the New Hut company for use in crypto mining and other operations. One of the biggest Bitcoin holders will have a self-mining capability of 5.6 exahashes per second (EH/s), and, therefore, encompass five sites in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, New York, and Texas.

Private Companies  With the Largest Bitcoin Holdings (in no particular order):

• Block.one

Block.one  is a software company that focuses on high-performance blockchain solutions. Following its launch in May 2017, its flagship project, EOSIO, an open-source blockchain technology created to facilitate secure data transfer and high-performance decentralized apps, has gained acclaim as the first effective blockchain platform for developers.

In 2018, Block.one carried out an ICO for EOS, its native cryptocurrency token, and raised a record of $4 billion.

• The Tezos Foundation

The Tezos Foundation  is a nonprofit organization that supports the growth and promotion of the Tezos (XTZ) blockchain network. It was established in 2018. The foundation, among other things, is in charge of managing and allocating the money acquired during the ICO to help the Tezos ecosystem continue to grow and be sustainable.

Its CFO, Roman Schnider is a huge Bitcoin proponent and considers Bitcoin to be a “key store of value.” 

• Tether Holdings

Tether Holdings  has a tight connection to the development and administration of the Tether (USDT) stablecoin. Tether Holdings conducts business by creating and administering Tether tokens that are based on several blockchain technologies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. One U.S. dollar is supposed to be represented by each Tether token.

Countries With the Largest Bitcoin Holdings (in no particular order):

• Ukraine

The amount of Bitcoin managed by the Ukrainian government has been collected mostly from donations from individuals and companies. The nation has benefited greatly from financial assistance in the form of cryptocurrencies throughout the conflict with Russia that began last year. Ukraine was quite open to the blockchain industry even before the war, establishing helpful crypto rules and making it simpler for crypto companies to conduct business there and, therefore is one of the biggest Bitcoin holders among countries.

• The United States

The United States is the largest holder of Bitcoin among countries. Most of its Bitcoin holdings was seized in three cases – Silk Road, Bitfinex, and the seizure of James Zhong’s BTC. Bitcoin has been seized by numerous government organizations throughout the years. For the whole Bitcoin ecosystem, the lack of traceability for the government’s cache of bitcoins has major ramifications because it makes it challenging to determine and establish ownership of the cryptocurrency, which is predicated on principles of transparency.

• El Salvador

Most people are probably most familiar with El Salvador as a Bitcoin-owning nation. The nation of Central America, however, went above and above by adopting Bitcoin as legal cash in 2021, making it the first nation in the world to do so.

Who Is the Biggest Bitcoin Holder?

Satoshi Nakamoto – 1 million BTC

By being the first miner to produce blocks of transactions, Satoshi Nakamoto not only invented but also launched Bitcoin. On January 3rd 2009, Satoshi is thought to have mined over 22,000 blocks and earned a total of over one million Bitcoin in block rewards. As a result, Satoshi is thought to be the owner of the largest Bitcoin cache , which currently stands at more than 1 million BTC, or almost $23 billion making him one of the biggest Bitcoin holders. This Bitcoin is dispersed among 22,000 addresses rather than being kept in a single address. With the exception of a few test transactions, none of it was ever used. Since his departure from the project in 2010, Satoshi has gone silent.

However, a year ago, over 100 BTC were moved  from two dormant Bitcoin wallets from Satoshi era. Because the account had previously been dormant for more than ten years, it has stirred up controversy in the cryptocurrency world. Both addresses have earned 50 BTC for mining blocks back in June 2010. For several years, there was essentially no activity. There were two microtransactions that entered the wallet in the previous six months for the modest amount of 0.00000547 BTC. Due to the combination of two mining address outputs, it is believed that the coins that were moved belonged to the same owner just might be Satoshi himself. 

The other 9 Biggest Bitcoin holders in order are: 

Who is the largest Individual Bitcoin investor?

Michael Saylor (MicroStrategy) – ~ $481 million

Over time, Bitcoin has drawn a large number of unusual investors. But nobody embodies fire and enthusiasm like MicroStrategy Inc. (MSTR) CEO Michael Saylor who is definitely one of the biggest Bitcoin holders. 

By purchasing $250 million worth of Bitcoin in August 2020, the company started accumulating cryptocurrencies. The company claimed at the time that it was purchasing the cryptocurrency in order to make better use of the cash it had on hand. 

Saylor has grown to be a fervent proponent of Bitcoin over time and has spoken at conferences for news and cryptocurrencies to promote its advantages and applications. MicroStrategy boosted its Bitcoin holdings to $3.5 billion by December 2021, jumping in to purchase the digital currency as its price fell.

Following the acquisition of Bitcoin, MicroStrategy’s stock price soared by more than 337% (as of December 2021). As a result of his wager on Bitcoin, Forbes pegged Saylor’s net worth at $1.6 billion. Microstrategy bought 2,500 more Bitcoins in December 2022, increasing its holdings once more. Microstrategy had roughly 132,500 Bitcoin, or about $3.2 billion, as of February 2023.

According to the latest data, MicroStrategy sits on a $3.8 billion BTC stash while Saylor holds $480 million worth of BTC in a personal capacity.

Conclusion

The number of people generating billions off the new asset class surged as cryptocurrency gained popularity. Cryptocurrency millionaires are a diverse group; some have made their billions by offering goods and services to the developing ecosystem, while others have done so by profiting from the volatility of the cryptocurrency market. It should be noted that the BTC is distributed more evenly than other cryptocurrencies. 

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research , the Bitcoin ecosystem “is still dominated by large and concentrated players, be they large miners, bitcoin holders, or exchanges,” The majority of the profits from increased adoption are expected to fall disproportionately to a small number of players because of bitcoin’s intrinsic concentration, which makes it prone to systemic risk. Keep in mind that there is a risk of loss in every trading. Before trading, always do your own research, taking a look at the most recent news, fundamental and technical analysis, and analyst opinion.