Galaxy Puts 11.1 Million Bitcoin in Addresses It Cannot Name

Galaxy Research cannot put a name to 11.1 million bitcoin. That is the finding in the firm's October supply snapshot, which three outlets reported on Monday morning from the same material. Roughly 55% of all bitcoin sits in addresses the firm's analysts could not match to any known holder. The named 45% covers exchanges, the spot ETFs led by BlackRock, the US government and a cluster tied to Bitcoin's earliest miner. None of that settles who holds the larger half.

What attribution actually measures

Attribution is a matching exercise. Analysts group addresses that appear to move together, then check those groups against entities already identified, using know-your-customer records where they exist. An address outside every group is unattributed. It is not ownerless. The ledger carries balances and transaction history, and nothing at all about the people behind them.

Galaxy's caveats, as CoinDesk and crypto.news both carry them, name four things the 11.1 million can hold. Coins in self-custody. Coins lost for good to discarded devices or owners who died without recovery instructions. Early coins never tied to an identity. And institutions the firm has not identified, among them funds, companies and over-the-counter desks. The snapshot separates none of those, and it does not establish how much of the total belongs to retail buyers.

The named side of the ledger

One number on the attributed side is identical to the coin in all three accounts: 1,123,658 BTC in the cluster Galaxy ties to the Patoshi pattern, the regular signature left in the earliest blocks by a single miner. That classification rests on mining behaviour and identifies nobody. crypto.news stands alone on two further figures, putting BlackRock's IBIT at about 814,263 BTC and the funds Lookonchain tracks at a combined 1,284,312 BTC as of 22 October. Neither appears in the other two accounts read here. COINOTAG is the only one to give the attributed half a coin total, at roughly 9 million BTC.

"More than half of all BTC supply is sitting in addresses with no known attribution," Alex Thorn, Galaxy's head of research, wrote on X, in CoinDesk's rendering of the post.

Two outlets, two denominators

The denominator moves between accounts. CoinDesk and COINOTAG both measure the 11.1 million against roughly 20.1 million bitcoin mined to date. crypto.news says "circulating supply" in its opening sentence and "mined supply" further down the same piece. Those are different quantities and neither account reconciles them. The division holds at this scale either way, since 11.1 against 20.1 is 55.2%.

Thorn's post splits three ways as well. CoinDesk gives one continuous sentence, quoted above. COINOTAG breaks the same post into two fragments, the second adding that a large share is held by individuals in self-custody. crypto.news carries no direct quotation and paraphrases. We could not establish which rendering is the posted text. Xapo Bank's reply gets the same treatment, appearing in CoinDesk as "Retail have been here for over a decade. Everyone else still catching up" and in COINOTAG as two shorter pieces of the same thought.

The share can fall without a coin moving

Nothing in the snapshot measures supply that is held rather than merely unlabelled, and the two get conflated the moment a figure like this travels. A newly identified custodian would cut the unattributed share while every balance stayed exactly where it is. Read the other way, the number is a ceiling on how far named institutional ownership has reached, and that ceiling has been tested all month. Spot bitcoin funds turned October negative a second time on 23 October, and the drop through the weekend before saw longs absorb over 90% of the liquidations.

What Galaxy has not published, in any account read here, is the snapshot itself. This desk did not open it. The 11.1 million figure, the 55% and the Patoshi count all arrive through reporting on an X post, and the firm's method is described in those reports in general terms only. Whether the unattributed share moves in the November snapshot will say something about Galaxy's labelling. It will say less about who owns bitcoin.