Who Owns The Most Bitcoin (November 2025)

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Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, is the largest holder of the currency, in possession of 1.096 million BTC (around $114 billion). Arkham’s tags are derived from a known mining pattern referred to as the Patoshi Pattern, and include the only (known) addresses from which Satoshi spent BTC from. Arkham’s research indicates he acquired this amount as a reward for mining 22,000 blocks. The individual wallet holding the largest amount of BTC is a Binance exchange wallet, with almost 250,000 Bitcoin.

Using Arkham, we can see which specific wallets hold the most Bitcoin:

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Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency which operates on the blockchain - a peer-to-peer network. Because of these properties, nobody is the real owner of the Bitcoin network as a whole, but individuals can access & own the Bitcoin controlled by their own private keys.

Bitcoin’s substantial appreciation in price, to around $126,000 in October 2025 and a peak market capitalization of $2.48 trillion, has consequently produced several Bitcoin billionaires and other affluent holders along the way. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the people, companies and wallets which have become crypto whales and investigate the amounts of Bitcoin they hold, based on on-chain data and their own public announcements.

Note: Bitcoin’s price is constantly fluctuating and the amount of BTC held by specific wallets may change over time. To stay up to date with the latest, sign up to Arkham and review our Bitcoin token page to see the top token holders.

SUMMARY

• Satoshi Nakamoto is the largest holder of Bitcoin, in possession of 1.1 million Bitcoin worth approximately $116 billion at today’s prices.
• Coinbase holds almost 874k BTC in total. BlackRock, Binance and Strategy also hold large amounts, custodying over 797,000. 620,000 and 472,000 BTC respectively.
• The United States Government holds 326k Bitcoin. These holdings are from various asset seizures of criminal organisations.
• There are multiple unknown Bitcoin billionaire wallets, with most being inactive following the initial inflow of Bitcoin to the wallet.

LARGEST BITCOIN WALLETS

The Arkham Intel Platform groups wallets associated with one person or organisation into “entities”. Entities are useful because ‍large holders rarely keep all their assets in a single wallet for security and operational reasons. By grouping all associated wallets into a single entity, the Intel Platform provides a much more accurate and complete picture of that entity's total holdings and influence in the crypto market.

However, it is also possible to look at individual wallets, separated from their labelled entity. Below is a table of the top individual wallets. The top four are all cold wallets controlled by the world’s largest exchanges. 

The fifth largest wallet is controlled by the U.S. Government from the Bitfinex Hack Recovery. The sixth largest is a wallet controlled by Tether to manage their Bitcoin reserves.

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TOP HOLDERS FROM EACH CATEGORY

These are the top BTC entities from each of the main entity categories: individuals, exchanges, ETF issuers, governments, public companies, and private companies. 

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EXCHANGES

Coinbase takes the top spot for exchange BTC holders, with 874k BTC worth $92.5 billion USD identified on-chain (on behalf of themselves & customers custodying with Coinbase). Coinbase is also known to invest a portion of its net income in crypto assets and also holds a certain amount for operating purposes i.e. to meet customer withdrawals at any given time.

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‍Binance and Upbit are also large exchange holders of Bitcoin, with 620k and 176k BTC respectively. Exchange cold wallets custody client deposits and generally do not represent the exchange’s ownership.

At the time of writing, Coinbase controls 4.11% of the total BTC supply, Binance controls 3.11%, and Upbit controls 0.88%.

ETF ISSUERS

Following the launch of Bitcoin spot ETFs in the United States in January 2024, Arkham was the first to identify the locations of the holdings of all of the ETFs on-chain. 

These include the following:

• BlackRock (797k BTC)
• Grayscale (224K BTC)
• Fidelity (389K BTC)
• Bitwise (41K BTC)
• ARK Invest (41K BTC)
• VanEck (18K BTC)
• WisdomTree (13.42K BTC)
• Invesco (6.1K BTC)
• Franklin Templeton (5.7K BTC)
• Valkyrie (5.6K BTC)
  
  

Grayscale is an asset manager that offers a range of products for public markets. The company is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group. All digital assets from Grayscale’s financial products are also stored under the custody of Coinbase. While Grayscale publicly reports their BTC balances, they refused to identify the on-chain addresses of the trust - Arkham was able to find these on-chain, totalling 627K BTC spread across >1750 different addresses, with each holding no more than 1000 BTC. Grayscale currently holds 224k BTC, worth $23.6 billion USD.

Read our full guide on crypto ETFs here. 

GOVERNMENTS

Many of the largest countries in the world have confirmed Bitcoin holdings, or have had BTC holdings in the past.

Data from the Arkham Intel Platform reveals these as the top five BTC-holding governments that have been verified on-chain. Many more governments may hold Bitcoin, but their holdings have not been verified.

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Asset seizures

The United States takes the top position with a wallet size of 326k BTC. This Bitcoin was recovered by the FBI from both the Bitfinex hack and seized from the Silk Road marketplace and Silk Road hacker James Zhong. More recently, the U.S Government acquired 127K BTC from the LuBian Hacker address. 

The United Kingdom holds 61,245 BTC worth $7.13b USD. The UK Metropolitan Police seized 61,000 Bitcoin from Jian Wen and Zhimin Qian in 2018, gaining access to the seized BTC in July 2021.

In November 2020, China’s authorities confiscated 194,775 Bitcoin from the operators of the PlusToken Ponzi scheme. The tokens were forfeited to the local government but it remains unclear whether China still holds the Bitcoin or if they have sold it off. For a full report into crypto in China in 2025, click here. 

Since the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Ukraine has also received $22.8 million in Bitcoin donations. Based on Ukrainian government data reported in April 2021, more than 700,000 public officials in Ukraine have also declared owning Bitcoin with some individuals owning as much as 18,000 BTC. Allegedly, Ukrainian public officials own an aggregated total of 46,351 BTC. While public official holdings are not strictly governmental holdings, extensive and declared ownership of Bitcoin by Civil Servants is significant and unusual nonetheless.

In January 2024 the German Government seized 50K of BTC from a movie piracy site called Movie2k. However, this has been completely sold off during July 2024.

Sovereign adoption

Unlike most countries that have confiscated and held Bitcoin following criminal arrests, El Salvador has boldly embraced Bitcoin as legal tender. El Salvador famously purchased 2,546 BTC at a cost of $108 million. Moreover, in November 2022, President of El Salvador Nayyib Bukele announced that the country would also be purchasing 1 Bitcoin every day. El Salvador currently holds 6,272 BTC worth $729.62M.

Bhutan has been mining Bitcoin since 2019 and in May 2023, Bhutan’s sovereign wealth fund, Druk Holding and Investments, announced a $500 million partnership with Bitdeer to expand its Bitcoin mining operations. Given Bhutan’s geographical location advantage, the country has constructed numerous hydroelectric power plants along its glacial rivers. The country will now be leveraging its cheap and abundant hydroelectric power to mine Bitcoin and invest profits into the country’s development. Bhutan currently holds 9,969 BTC worth $1.16b USD.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is actively positioning itself as a global crypto hub. Recently, Arkham uncovered significant mining operations in the Gulf state. The UAE has 6.4k BTC tokens. These holdings come from Bitcoin mining operations carried out by Citadel, a public mining company majority owned by UAE Royal Group through IHC (International Holding Company).

PUBLIC COMPANIES 

With the growing adoption and recognition of Bitcoin’s value as a digital asset, public companies have embraced Bitcoin as part of their investment strategies or diversification of corporate reserves. 

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), led by Michael Saylor, holds more Bitcoin than any other public company. The company has been accumulating Bitcoin since August 2020, making purchases of varying sizes every few weeks. Their total holdings are 641,692 Bitcoin ($68.3 billion).

MARA is a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company in North America and another large holder of BTC. They run 9 mining facilities and mined 22.7 Bitcoin on average per day in September 2025. According to Arkham data, MARA’s on-chain wallets hold 18,152 BTC (worth $1.93 billion). However, they are reported to be holding a treasury stockpile of 53.2k BTC.

Metaplanet, a Tokyo-listed company, has earned the nickname "Japan’s MicroStrategy." The firm is acquiring Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset, citing it as a critical hedge against the long-term depreciation of the Japanese yen and broader economic uncertainty. Metaplanet's current holdings stand at 30.8k BTC (approximately $3.28 billion).

PRIVATE COMPANIES

According to verified on-chain data, the two biggest BTC-holding private companies are Tether with 87.6k BTC and SpaceX with 7.3k BTC. 

SpaceX first bought BTC in 2021 and at one point held 28k BTC. However, it has reduced its holdings by over 70% since then. In August this year, SpaceX’s holdings were worth $1 billion.

According to the Bitcoin Treasuries website, Block.one is the largest BTC-holding private company with 164k BTC. Block.one is a private technology company and investment firm that is best known as the original developer of the EOSIO open-source blockchain software. Their substantial holdings cannot be verified on-chain. 

UNATTRIBUTED WALLETS

To explore these unattributed wallets further, copy the address and paste it into the search bar on the Arkham Intel Platform.

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CONCLUSION

What began as a niche project among cryptography enthusiasts has evolved into a globally significant financial asset with many companies, people, and governments as holders. The strong appeal of holding Bitcoin for users emerges from the currency’s decentralized properties, which ensure nobody owns the Bitcoin network as a whole & makes taking control of this network completely prohibitively costly even for the most determined of attackers.

Bitcoin’s maximum supply of 21 million coins is a fundamental aspect of the project’s design, ensuring it remains a scarce asset and that no more can be printed to inflate the currency’s value. Accounting for an estimated permanent loss of 3.7 million BTC in inaccessible wallets, Bitcoin’s actual total supply is even lower.

With Arkham’s Token Pages, users can easily monitor the top holders of Bitcoin, find the largest inflows and outflows, and filter for specific Bitcoin transactions.