Willy Woo's Table Puts India First With 68 Million Bitcoin Owners

India holds more bitcoin owners than any other country, with an estimated 68 million people holding the asset. That is the top row of a country-by-country table the on-chain analyst Willy Woo published on 1 September, and it has been moving through social feeds since. The same table puts India's ownership rate at 4.6% of the national population. The United States comes second on headcount, at about 50 million. An Instagram post from the account cryptocrazeadnan turned two of those slides into a claim that India is now number one in bitcoin ownership.

The rows behind the headline

Woo's table ranks countries by the number of people estimated to own bitcoin, not by the share of the population that does. India sits at row 01 with 68 million owners and a 4.6% population share, and those are the figures the Instagram slides reproduced. Below India come the United States at roughly 50 million, China at about 33 million, Indonesia at 22 million and Brazil at 21 million. The Crypto Times reported the table on 1 September and CryptoNewsZ carried the same numbers that day. The Arabian Post ran them again on 5 September. The three accounts agree on every row we checked.

"BTC ownership by country. 4.5-6% global adoption," Woo wrote above the table on 1 September.

First by headcount, twelfth by rate

That range works out at 370 million to 500 million bitcoin owners worldwide. Against it, the post's claim that India leads holds on one measure and fails on another. By absolute owners India is first. By share of population it is twelfth, on the same table. Vietnam tops the rate column at 17%, with the United Arab Emirates at 16% and Argentina at 15%. The United States runs at 14%, roughly three times India's rate on a population about a fifth the size. None of that contradicts the 68 million figure. It measures something else.

Where the count comes from

Woo's numbers are not a headcount. The methodology published alongside them combines Glassnode's on-chain data, research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and user surveys from Crypto.com, with figures from 2024 onward carried forward on growth rates. Woo has said the estimates draw on "different studies and datasets across periods, while more recent figures involve projections." Counting owners is hard for a structural reason. One person can control many addresses, and a single exchange address can hold balances for millions of customers. Survey work lands somewhere else again, and current owners came to 17.6% of respondents in a 1,000-voter sample reported on 11 September.

A second tally that counts more people

A separate compilation also puts India first, on a larger number. Investing in the Web, updated on 9 June, estimated Indian cryptocurrency owners at about 104.4 million, or 7.2% of the population, drawing on Triple-A's ownership study and the Chainalysis adoption index. That sits some 36 million above Woo's count. The two do not reconcile as like-for-like figures, because one counts bitcoin owners and the other counts owners of any cryptocurrency. On rank they point the same way.

No official body publishes an Indian bitcoin owner count, and nothing in either table is audited. Domestic activity around the asset class keeps building in other forms, and a tokenized bond pilot settled $107 million in the country on 12 September. Whether the 68 million figure survives will depend on the next refresh of the datasets under it. Woo has not said when that is due.