The Number of Bitcoin Millionaires Has Gone Parabolic

Bitcoin’s price surge to $23,000 this morning caused a record number of wallet addresses to be worth over a million dollars, as per data from on-chain analytics firm Glassnode.

Over 66,540 addresses now hold $1 million worth of Bitcoin as a result, with the figure rising by a staggering 150% in the past day.

Glassnode pointed out that the surge meant early miners—individuals who provided computing power to the Bitcoin network in its earliest years in exchange for block rewards—were now “millionaire addresses.”

“All you had to do to be a millionaire today, is mine a single #Bitcoin block between 2009 and 2012,” said Glassnode CTO Rafael Schultze-Kraft in a tweet this morning. He added, “You had 210,000 chances to do so,” referring to the number of total blocks that awarded 50 Bitcoin and above to miners at the time.

Bitcoin zoomed past $20,000 on Wednesday night, crossing the $21,000 and $22,000 hurdles in the hours afterward, and reaching the historic $23,000 mark on Thursday morning. The surge came as the asset saw increased interest from legacy fund managers amidst fears of overinflation among fiat currencies.

The asset trades at $22,675 at press time and is up 15% in the past day.

Scott Minerd, the CIO of Guggenheim Partners, a macro hedge firm founded in 2000, even gave Bitcoin a price target of $400,000 in an interview with financial media outlet Bloomberg yesterday. The metric, if reached, would peg Bitcoin’s entire market cap at $7.2 trillion.