Bitcoin Rich List: Biggest Bitcoin Holders in 2023

Bitcoin is the king of cryptocurrency, and has a market cap valuation of more than $500 billion. 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.

Bitcoin rich list and top 10 biggest holders in 2023

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 August 28, 2023.

The distribution of the Bitcoin supply by holder size. Image source: Glassnode

1. Binance cold wallet

Holdings: 248,597 BTC

Dollar value: $6.4 billion

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The 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. 

2. Bitfinex cold wallet

Holdings: 178,010 BTC

Dollar value: $4.6 billion

The 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 in 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 of 2020. 

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3. Robinhood wallet

Holdings: 118,300 BTC 

Dollar value: $3 billion

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The 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. 

4. Binance cold wallet

Holdings: 115,177 BTC

Dollar value: $3 billion

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This is another cold wallet controlled by the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. In June 2023, it received a massive 130,177 BTC transaction from another Binance cold wallet. This was a cold wallet change, as the wallet that funded this wallet sent out practically its entire BTC balance in the transaction.

So far, this wallet has not sent out any Bitcoin transactions. Besides the large transaction that initially funded the wallet, it has only received a handful of very small transactions since.

5. FBI wallet (BTC from 2016 Bitfinex hack)

Holdings: 94,643 BTC

Dollar value: $2.4 billion

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This 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.

6. Unidentified owner #1

Holdings: 94,505 BTC

Dollar value: $2.4 billion

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It is not clear who owns the sixth-largest Bitcoin wallet. This wallet first became active in September 2019, when it made headlines by receiving a whopping 94,500 BTC in a single transaction. Ever since, the wallet has been receiving only very small Bitcoin transactions.

So far, the wallet has only sent out Bitcoin on two occasions. Both transactions happened in July of 2021 and only included fairly small amounts of BTC (0.1 BTC and 0.618 BTC, respectively).

According to an analysis by TokenAnalyst, about a third of the 94,500 BTC held by this wallet originated from the Huobi cryptocurrency exchange. However, it is unclear whether this wallet is associated with Huobi or if it simply belongs to a whale or institution that withdrew the funds from their Huobi account.

Zooming in to the flow of money, we see that a third of the 94.5k @Bitcoin directly originates from @HuobiGlobal.

These funds are currently sitting at 37XuVSEpWW4trkfmvWzegTHQt7BdktSKUs and are unspent.

We’ll be keeping an eye on where these funds move to…? pic.twitter.com/rT5wIFPRu9

— TokenAnalyst (@thetokenanalyst) September 6, 2019

7. Mt. Gox hacker wallet

Holdings: 79,957 BTC

Dollar value: $2 billion

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This wallet is controlled by someone that 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 bitcoind 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.

— Mark Karpelès (@MagicalTux) August 1, 2023

Apart from this massive transaction of 79,956 stolen BTC, the wallet has only been receiving very small transactions since. Interestingly, this wallet is yet to send out any Bitcoin, despite being created all the way back in 2011.

8. FBI wallet (BTC confiscated from Silk Road)

Holdings: 69,370 BTC

Dollar value: $1.8 billion

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This 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 from the operators of the Silk Road marketplace directly. 

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. 

9. Binance BTCB reserve

Holdings: 68,200 BTC

Dollar value: $1.7 billion

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This wallet contains the reserve Binance uses to back the BTCB token. BTCB is a token that’s pegged to 1 BTC, and is issued on the BNB Chain blockchain platform as a BEP2 token. Conceptually, BTCB is similar to Wrapped Bitcoin, a BTC-pegged token issued on the Ethereum blockchain.

The BTC in this reserve are held so that Binance can guarantee that 1 BTCB token can always be exchanged for 1 BTC.

10. Unidentified owner #2

Holdings: 59,300 BTC

Dollar value: $1.5 billion

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The Bitcoin rich list of the 10 biggest holders is completed by an anonymous whale or perhaps an institution, which holds around 59,300 BTC. The wallet was funded by withdrawals from the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, which began in October of 2021. However, it has also received small Bitcoin transactions from wallets belonging to Binance and KuCoin in the last year.

This wallet has only made one notable outgoing transaction, a 10,000 BTC deposit to Bitfinex in July of 2022. 

The bottom line

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.

FAQs

Who has the most Bitcoins?

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 623,000 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.

How many people own 1 Bitcoin?

There are close to 859,000 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.