Since November of last year, the number of Bitcoin millionaires has decreased by more than 75% due to the cryptocurrency meltdown.
The decline in the cryptocurrency market has caused more than 80,000 Bitcoin (BTC) investors to lose their millionaire status, but lower prices indicate that the number of whole coiners is increasing.
Data from BitInfoCharts shows that on Nov. 12, just a few days after Bitcoin reached a new all-time high of almost $69,000, 108,886 BTC addresses reported a balance larger than $1 million.
Today, with the price of Bitcoin battling to stay over $20,000, only 26,284 addresses are said to hold assets worth more than $1 million, which means that over the past nine months, the number of paper millionaires has decreased by more than 75%.
The number of whales, or cryptocurrency investors who claim a wallet with more than $10 million in value, has also been affected by the sharp decrease in the price of the leading cryptocurrency. Just 4,342 locations still have a minimum cash value of $10 million today, down from 10,587 in November of last year—a 58 percent decrease.
The bear market has seen more than 13,000 new “wholecoiners” — wallets containing one or more BTC — introduced to the system, raising the total number of wholecoiners to slightly over 860,000. This is despite the drop in the net worth of former BTC millionaires. This sharp increase in entire coiners would indicate that individual investors are stockpiling big sums of BTC as prices plummet.
More than 250,000 addresses have increased their holdings by at least 0.1 BTC, or $2,000 at the time of writing, during the past 20 days, according to data from Glassnode, lending further credence to the retail accumulation story.
Numerous problems have had a detrimental effect on bitcoin and the rest of the digital asset market, including increased regulatory scrutiny, persistent geopolitical upheaval, growing inflation, and interest rate hikes.
Commentators appear to concur that the price of risk assets like Bitcoin could continue to decline for an extended period of time due to the growing concern around the stability of global markets.
According to data from CoinMarketCap, at the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading for $20,005, down 1.63 percent over the previous 24 hours and 37 percent over the previous 30 days, with a total market capitalization of $382 billion.
