World Now Has 135,000 Crypto Millionaires, With Two-Thirds of Their Wealth in Bitcoin

Consulting firm Henley & Partners has published its annual Crypto Wealth Report 2026, assessing the distribution of wealth in the digital asset industry. According to the analysts’ estimates for the end of August, the world has 135,694 people whose crypto holdings exceed one million dollars. Of those, 92,272 investors made their million solely from bitcoin.

The Digital Pyramid: Billionaires, Centimillionaires and the Role of ETFs

The top of the crypto wealth pyramid remains highly concentrated. The Henley & Partners report records the following tiers of wealth:

• Crypto billionaires: 23 people worldwide hold digital assets worth $1 billion or more (9 of them keep their wealth mainly in BTC);
• Centimillionaires: 290 investors have capital of $100 million or more, and for 151 of them that threshold is crossed thanks to holdings of the first cryptocurrency alone;
• Overall user base: the global audience of owners of any crypto assets has reached 742 million people, about half of whom (371 million) hold bitcoin in their balances.

Total market capitalization at the time the ranking was compiled stood at $2.62 trillion, of which more than $1.56 trillion came from bitcoin. Experts attribute the notable rise in the number of dollar millionaires in 2026 to the institutionalization of the sector: the launch of spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) made it easier for large private capital to enter the asset.

Why the Blockchain Doesn’t Give Exact Numbers

The authors of the study specifically note the limitations of their methodology. Unlike bank accounts, public ledgers record public addresses rather than the identities of their owners.

The methodology note for the study describes a complex multi-stage filter:

• Initial parsing identified 123,222 unique addresses with a balance above $1 million in BTC equivalent;
• Algorithms filtered out exchange wallets, institutional custodians, and coin pools considered irretrievably lost;
• The program merged clusters of addresses belonging to the same individuals, yielding about 61,000 direct owners on cold and exchange addresses;
• Another 31,000 or so people were added after analyzing the shareholder structure of spot bitcoin funds.

Taking margins of error into account, the researchers estimate the real number of bitcoin millionaires at between 74,000 and 114,000. The legendary wallet of network creator Satoshi Nakamoto (about 1 million BTC) was deliberately excluded from the statistics: the coins have remained unmoved since 2010, and analysts classify them as lost supply.

The report demonstrates the market’s maturity: cryptocurrencies are no longer the preserve of lone enthusiasts, and bitcoin has firmly cemented its status as a digital reserve asset that accounts for the lion’s share of large private capital in Web3.