You ever wonder how many possible crypto wallets are there in the market right now?

This question is better tackled by looking at the theoretical possible number of wallets that have been used. According to Glassnode’s Total Addresses metric, which is “The total number of unique addresses that ever appeared in a transaction of the native coin in the network”, current data shows there being a bit over a billion unique total addresses in the Bitcoin network. On the Ethereum side, and despite Ethereum’s blazing popularity it gets in the media, only a relative mere 176 million unique total addresses have been seen on the network. 

Let’s have some fun with these numbers…

So how many unique wallets could there have been in the market right now?

Adding up the two totals gives us a possible 1.276 billion unique total addresses in the crypto market, which for now, let’s assume this number can reflect the total number of bitcoin/crypto wallets (wallets) in the market. This is of course incorporating a lot of assumptions such as:

• One address per wallet (a wallet can actually have multiple addresses).

• The same Ethereum addresses are also used for all other EVM networks (to prevent double counting).

• Looking only at the bitcoin and ethereum network as they comprise the majority of crypto activity anyways.

From a wallet team perspective, how much opportunity is there?

If we try to financially quantify market sizing, we could potentially take the per unit cost of let’s say a Ledger Nano X (approximately $150 / unit) and multiply it by the total unique address stemming from above. That would come out to a staggering $191,400 mil. Do bear in mind that this is only a fraction of the total global population, which as of today stands at around 8 billion people. For those familiar with market sizing formulas such as TAM (Total Addressable Market), this would come out to a staggering $1.2 trillion ( [$191,400 mil x 8 bil] / 1.276 bil ). A farfetched and highly optimistic number for sure. A better exercise is to take another common market sizing formula, Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), and get a more realistic number. But this is an exercise for another time, rather the point I am trying to make is that not one single or oligopoly of wallet makers can tackle this market all by themselves (there is still more room for wallet competitors!). 

And what about crypto value per wallet?

Another interesting take is to calculate the average value per wallet whether it be for Bitcoin or Ethereum. Doing this would simply have each network’s total market cap divided by their unique total addresses which comes out to $468 and $1,206 per wallet address for Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively. Quite eye-popping considering that Ethereum has only 20% of the number of unique addresses compared to Bitcoin but has an average value to wallet address that comes out to more than double. What can be reasonably inferred from this is that Ethereum is still quite an exclusive circle for the few despite the tenfold amount of media coverage it gets over Bitcoin. Does this mean that if a newbie comes into Ethereum they’ll have a higher chance of holding more value than in Bitcoin? No.

To keep this short and sweet, here are some takeaways from this simple exercise:

• Large untapped market share is an enabler of further growth & diversity in the wallet market.

• Ethereum wallets’ lopsided average value per wallet address is reflective of its exclusivity versus Bitcoin’s altruistic community.

• If we included the market cap values of all EVM networks and continued to assume all UTA on the Ethereum network are the same addresses used for those different EVMs, an average value per wallet address for all EVM networks would be possibly 5x higher.

As mentioned before in previous blogs, your wallet diversification is more important than your crypto asset diversification.