109 bitcoin whales with more than 10 thousand bitcoins
The Bitcoin wallet has long gone from being a gimmick to an electronic accessory that almost every financially literate person has. However, no matter how many bitcoins you have in your balance, that number pales in comparison to the few cryptocurrency wallets that hold the equivalent of billions of dollars in BTC.
Who are the oligarchs of the cryptocurrency world and where do they store their wealth?
Bitcoin kits - giants of the crypto market
A year ago, when the first prerequisites for explosive growth began to appear bitcoin pricesBut not many people believed in it. Judge for yourself, a person accustomed to the dynamics of the stock and foreign exchange market, and any sensible person, the growth of the BTC rate about 1000% seems fantastic.
However, as in any business, there were far-sighted and risky enough investors who believed such bitcoin price forecasts and risked investing millions of dollars to buy cryptocurrencies. It is worth noting that this was not a one-time purchase - in moments of price correction such investors added more coins, increasing their cryptocurrency wealth. Similar to the blue whale, which is the largest animal on Earth, owners of a fortune of 1,000 BTC or more are commonly referred to as whales in the cryptocurrency market.
More than 17 million coins already mined (80% of the total number of bitcoins planned for release) are distributed among 23 million users. However, the wallet balances of about 13 million users of the network are less than 1 BTC. The bulk of the cryptocurrency is concentrated in just over 1,500 bitcoin wallets. In addition, 109 BTC wallets have more than 10 thousand bitcoins on their balance each.
For example, one of the wallets, allegedly owned by the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, has as much as 189,000 BTC on its balance. At the current bitcoin-dollar exchange rate, that's as much as $1.5 billion.
Cryptocurrency whales treat their savings in different ways. Some wallets are inactive - their owners simply store bitcoins on them without moving them anywhere. Experts believe that in some cases, these may be the accounts of cryptocurrency enthusiasts who at the dawn of the digital era have mined thousands of BTC, but then for some reason (loss of private key, loss of equipment, etc.) lost access to them.
Other cryptocurrency whales, on the contrary, are very active. For example, the fourth-largest BTC wallet in terms of balance size is regularly replenished when bitcoin drops on cryptocurrency exchanges.
Fort Knox for Bitcoin
Wealthy people would not be wealthy if they did not take care to properly store their wealth. Swiss and British banks have long been the benchmark for storing money, and only a complete "dummy" doesn't know about the U.S. gold reserve at Fort Knox. You will be all the more curious to know that in the digital world there is a peculiar analogue of this vault.
In the Swiss Alps there is a former military bunker that was bought by Xapo and converted into a bitcoin storage facility. The bunker itself is hollowed out in granite rock, and its location is secret and known only to VIPs.
Since bitcoin does not have its physical embodiment, the vault stores the private keys of many cryptocurrency whales' BTC wallets. For storage, so-called "cold rooms" are used - special rooms enclosed by slabs of steel that form a Faraday cage. Their purpose is to reliably shield the digital wealth from electromagnetic pulses that could damage the company's servers. In addition, the "cold rooms" themselves are located under a rock at a depth of about 320 meters, and the servers are not connected to the Internet.
According to experts, the Xapo vault holds about 7% of all available bitcoins (and no other cryptocurrencies are accepted for storage) worth about $10 billion. The key withdrawal protocol includes a multi-level authorization procedure and advanced biometric control.
Conclusion
To our great regret, Satoshi Nakamoto's revolutionary idea to make everyone free and independent with the help of cryptocurrency seems to fail, crashing against the realities of the modern world, where 0.71T of the world's population owns almost half of all the world's wealth.
Nevertheless, even without being a whale, cryptocurrencies can and should be used to increase one's wealth. After all, if many wealthy people keep their wealth in "crypto," it means they believe in its prospects. For us, this means that the cryptocurrency market will be profitable for traders and investors for a long time to come.