Miners process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Bitcoin is a distributed ledger for transfer and store of value (a blockchain). Bitcoin was founded by a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto and launched in 2009.

BTC holders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

github

block explorer

Blockchains (L1)

Bitcoin

# Bitcoin Token holders Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Bitcoin token holders metric counts the total number of unique addresses that hold a non-zero Bitcoin balance at any given point in time. This metric provides insight into Bitcoin adoption and distribution by tracking how many individual addresses are actively holding Bitcoin. The calculation leverages Bitcoin's UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) model to determine address balances and counts addresses with positive balances as token holders.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on the following raw blockchain data sources:
- **Bitcoin transaction data**: Complete Bitcoin blockchain transaction records including inputs, outputs, and transaction metadata
- **Bitcoin UTXO data**: Unspent Transaction Output records that represent the current state of Bitcoin ownership
- **Bitcoin address transaction history**: Historical transaction data for each Bitcoin address to track balance changes over time
- **Bitcoin block data**: Block headers and timestamps to provide temporal context for holder count calculations
- **Chain availability metadata**: Data quality indicators that identify periods when Bitcoin blockchain data is complete and reliable

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Native bitcoin holder identification
- **Purpose**: Identifies and counts unique Bitcoin addresses with non-zero balances
- **Logic**: The underlying `bitcoin_native_tokenholders` model processes Bitcoin's UTXO data to determine current address balances. Since Bitcoin uses a UTXO model rather than account balances, this requires analyzing all unspent transaction outputs to calculate the effective balance for each address. Addresses with positive balances (meaning they control UTXOs with combined value greater than zero) are counted as token holders. The calculation is performed at daily intervals with timestamp graining to provide historical trends.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` for temporal tracking, `chain` for blockchain identification, and `tokenholders` for the count of unique addresses with positive balances

### Component B: Data standardization and finalization  
- **Purpose**: Applies consistent formatting and metadata standards across all token holder metrics
- **Logic**: The `finalize_metric_tokenholders` macro transforms the raw holder count data into Token Terminal's standardized metric format. This includes adding project metadata (setting data_id to 'bitcoin'), ensuring consistent field naming conventions, applying any business rules for holder count calculations, and adding derived fields needed for reporting and analysis.
- **Key fields**: Standardized metric schema fields including project identifiers, metric classifications, and formatted numerical values

### Component C: Data quality filtering
- **Purpose**: Ensures only reliable and complete data periods are included in the final metric
- **Logic**: The `apply_chain_availability_filter` removes any time periods where Bitcoin blockchain data might be incomplete, unreliable, or still being processed. This filter uses chain availability metadata to identify and exclude periods with potential data quality issues, ensuring the token holder counts are accurate and consistent.
- **Key fields**: Chain availability status indicators and data completeness flags

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The standardized holder count data is filtered for data quality to produce the final metric values
- **Currency conversion**: Not applicable as this is a count-based metric rather than a value-based metric
- **Time aggregation**: Daily snapshots of token holder counts with consistent timestamp boundaries
- **Final calculation**: The metric represents the count of unique Bitcoin addresses with positive balances at each daily timestamp, providing a time series of Bitcoin adoption and distribution

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Unique addresses holding a non-zero balance of the project's native token.

BitcoinBTC

Token holders

Token holders

Competitive landscape