Bitcoin’s guest list has a 55% mystery: 11.1 million $BTC remain unattributed

About 11.1 million $BTC, roughly 55% of the roughly 20.1 million bitcoin mined, was classified as unattributed in Galaxy Research’s October snapshot, according to reporting by Omkar Godbole published Oct 26, 2026 at 3:18 a.m. EDT. The coins were held in addresses the firm could not link to an exchange, fund, government or other known entity.

Galaxy said the holdings could belong to individuals, institutions it has not identified or holders who can no longer access them. The total may also include lost coins, unidentified institutional holdings and assets distributed across complex custody arrangements. At a quoted price of $84,459.46, Bitcoin $BTC has moved beyond fringe-asset status and drawn growing acceptance on Wall Street.

Galaxy head of research Alex Thorn wrote on X: “More than half of all BTC supply is sitting in addresses with no known attribution despite all the institutionalization and centralized ownership over the years, still a ton of bitcoin (maybe even most) is held by individuals in self-custody,” he wrote. Self-custody means holding your own bitcoin keys rather than leaving coins with an exchange or a fund.

Xapo Bank, a bitcoin-focused bank, replied to Thorn’s post, saying that the large number of coins held in unnamed wallets shows retail investors have been in the market for more than a decade: “And why bitcoin is for the people and people 'can be their own bank' Retail have been here for over a decade. Everyone else still catching up,” the bank wrote. Bitcoin is often seen as the first market that grew from the bottom up, with retail investors trading first and institutions embracing it later.

$BTC is the native token of the Bitcoin blockchain, a public ledger that lets anyone, anywhere, send and receive money. Miners verify transactions and add them to the ledger, earning newly issued $BTC as a reward; the setup is often held up as an example of a perfectly competitive market. A bitcoin address is like a bank account number on bitcoin’s public ledger: anyone can see how many coins sit at an address, while the owner’s identity remains hidden. Research firms such as Galaxy try to identify owners by tracking wallets associated with known entities.