The five largest cryptocurrency exchanges currently hold nearly 1.7 million bitcoins.
About 10% of Bitcoin’s current circulating supply is held on just five exchanges, data pooled by tracking site Chain.info shows.
As per the data, the combined on-chain balances for Coinbase, Huobi, Binance, OKEx and Kraken total around 1.7 million bitcoins.
Coinbase holds most BTC
Leading US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase at present holds the most bitcoin balances. According to Chain.info, unique wallets numbering over 4.38 million on the exchange hold over 944,800 bitcoins.
Close to 944,200 of the tokens are in cold wallets, with 623 in its deposit wallets. As of writing, only 0.1 BTC is in its hot wallets.
The second exchange with the most Bitcoin balances is Huobi, which accounts for nearly 324,000 BTC in more than 901,000 unique wallets. Crypto’s leading exchange by trading volume, Binance, has the third-largest on-chain balances for Bitcoin. The popular platform currently has close to 290,000 bitcoins in 2.67 million addresses.
OKEx, with just over 339,000 Bitcoin addresses, has an on-chain balance of 226,184 BTC. The top five exchanges’ list concludes with US-based Kraken that accounts for 126,500 of the circulating Bitcoin supply stored across 672,286 addresses.
CoinMarketCap data puts Bitcoin’s circulating supply at 18,517,643 BTC, while on-chain analytics terminal ByteTree puts the adjusted supply around 16,969,840 BTC.
Looking at these statistics, the five exchanges hold balances that account for nearly 10% of the circulating supply.
It’s 50% of the Bitcoin used for trading
In June, we highlighted a report by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis that delved into the numbers behind Bitcoin’s circulating supply.
From that report, nearly 60% (11.5 million Bitcoin at the time) was held for investment and thus not likely to be kept on exchanges. However, 3.5 million was actively traded, which means it frequently changes hands between investors and trading platforms.
If we go by the above figures, it would suggest 50% (1.7 million) of this supply is stored on the above five exchanges.
There’s an additional 3.7 million, or about 20% of supply, considered ‘lost.’ The figure might not be accurate given Bitcoin mined in 2009 moved for the first time in 2020. As such, the figure represents a fair account of what may never be recovered.