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Bitcoin adoption, by the numbers

Bitcoin adoption is real, uneven and hard to count. One U.S. spot ETF holds about 804,000 coins and public companies more than 1.2 million, yet a Federal Reserve survey finds about one in ten American adults used any cryptocurrency in a year. This page puts the main measures side by side, each with its source and date.

iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT)

803,871 BTC[1]

Bitcoin held by the fund, per its holdings file (as of Oct 15)

As of Oct 15, 2026

Strategy (MSTR)

848,250 BTC[2]

Bitcoin held, per its Oct 13 8-K

As of Oct 11, 2026

U.S. adults who used crypto in 2025

10%[3]

Federal Reserve SHED; 2% used it to pay

As of Oct 2025

Active addresses (one day)

549,423[4]

Coin Metrics, Saturday Oct 17; weekdays run higher (657,965 on Oct 16). Addresses are not people

As of Oct 17, 2026

How adoption is measured

Bitcoin has no account registry. People hold it through funds, companies, exchanges and their own wallets. One person can use many addresses, and an exchange pools its customers' coins into shared addresses. So every measure sees only part of the picture, and they often disagree.[5][6]

  • Holdings by funds, companies and governments are precise when they come from filings, but they show institutions, not individuals, and dates differ from one filer to the next.[2][1]
  • Onchain counts are public and checkable, but an address is not a person, and exchanges pool many users into a few addresses.[4][6]
  • Hashrate measures how much computing power miners commit to securing the network. It tracks miner investment, not users.[7]
  • Lightning capacity counts only public channels, and capacity is not payment volume. Channels that are never announced to the network are invisible to outside observers.[8][9]
  • Surveys count people, but they rely on self-reporting, usually ask about “cryptocurrency” rather than bitcoin, and word the question differently (used last year, ever used, own now).[3][10][11]
  • Country indexes blend several factors, include stablecoins and other tokens, and change their methods from year to year.[6]

Spot bitcoin ETFs

On January 10, 2024, the SEC approved exchange rule changes that let spot bitcoin exchange-traded products list on NYSE Arca, Nasdaq and Cboe BZX (Release No. 34-99306). Then-Chair Gary Gensler's statement that day said, “we did not approve or endorse bitcoin.” Farside's daily flow table starts on January 11, 2024, the first trading day.[12][13][14]

Issuers publish their holdings daily. The iShares Bitcoin Trust held 803,870.61 BTC on October 15, 2026, with net assets of about $65.3 billion on October 16. The Bitwise Bitcoin ETF held 37,317.87 BTC on October 15.[1][15][16]

By Farside's count, cumulative net flows into all U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs were about +$56.9 billion through October 16, 2026. That includes about +$65.6 billion into IBIT and about −$27.9 billion out of Grayscale's GBTC, which converted from an existing trust. Summing Farside's daily totals gives roughly +$0.36 billion for 2026 so far and −$614.7 million for October 1–16. Flows are in dollars, not bitcoin.[14][13]

An ETF share is a claim on a fund, not bitcoin you hold yourself. ARK 21Shares' fund page puts it this way: “An investment in the Trust is not a direct investment in bitcoin. Investors will also forgo certain rights conferred by owning bitcoin directly.”[17]

Bitcoin held by selected U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs, from issuer pages
FundBTC heldAs of
iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF IBIT[1]803,870.61
Bitwise Bitcoin ETF BITB[16]37,317.87

Other issuers, including Fidelity (FBTC), Grayscale (GBTC, BTC) and ARK 21Shares (ARKB), publish holdings on their own sites. We could not read them on the check date, so they are not shown. This is not a full list.

Public companies and treasuries

Strategy reported holding 848,250 BTC as of October 11, 2026, bought for an aggregate $64.00 billion, in an 8-K filed October 13.[2]

BitcoinTreasuries.net, a free aggregator, counted 1,285,230 BTC held by 200 public companies on October 17, 2026, or 6.12% of the supply cap of just under 21 million. On those numbers Strategy alone holds about two-thirds of the public-company total. Aggregator figures mix sources and dates, so treat them as an estimate.[18][2]

Company coins can be lent or pledged. MARA, for example, reported 9,270 of its 35,577 BTC as loaned or pledged as collateral at June 30, 2026. For BTC per share, mNAV and the risks of treasury companies, see our treasury companies page.[19]

Bitcoin held by selected public companies, from their own filings
CompanyBTCAs of
Strategy MSTR[2]848,250
Metaplanet 3350.T[20]44,000
MARA Holdings MARA[19]35,577
Coinbase COIN[21]17,864
Tesla TSLA[22]11,509
Block XYZ[23]9,117

Selected companies with primary filings, not a ranking. Dates differ. More detail on the treasury companies page.

Governments

We show only holdings that come from a government or a state body, and say so where none exists.

El Salvador's National Bitcoin Office publishes its treasury addresses and a public API. Since Decree No. 199 of January 2025, private-sector acceptance of bitcoin is voluntary, and in October 2026 the IMF said no further accumulation is expected beyond documented donations.[24][25][26]

Bhutan does not publish addresses or an audited balance. In December 2025 the King announced that up to 10,000 BTC from the national holding would go to the Gelephu Mindfulness City project. In July 2026 the state investment company, Druk Holding and Investments (DHI), told The Bhutanese it retains “well above 10,000” BTC, moved from older, publicly known addresses into professional custody wallets and trading platforms.[27][28][29]

Blockchain trackers that follow the older, publicly attributed Bhutan addresses show far lower balances, about 3,100 BTC in May 2026 according to Arkham data reported by CoinDesk. Arkham told CoinDesk its labels were not verified with officials, and DHI did not confirm a figure. We show no single number for Bhutan.[30]

The United States created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve by executive order on March 6, 2025. It is funded with bitcoin the Treasury holds from forfeitures, says that bitcoin “shall not be sold,” and allows only budget-neutral strategies to acquire more. The White House said the government holds “a significant amount of bitcoin” but gave no figure. We found no official published balance as of October 17, 2026.[31][32][33]

El Salvador

7,809.37 BTC[24]

Live, refreshed hourly. As of Oct 18, 2026, 8:16 PM EDT · 20 published addresses

Counts only the addresses the National Bitcoin Office publishes.[34] El Salvador and Bitcoin

Bhutan

No audited figure

The state investment company says it holds “well above 10,000” BTC in custody. It publishes no addresses.[29]

United States

No official balance

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve created Mar 6, 2025.[31] Strategic Bitcoin Reserve page

Onchain and network signals

Coin Metrics counted 657,965 active addresses on October 16, 2026 (Coin Metrics, Oct 16). The 30-day average for Sep 17–Oct 16, 2026 was 646,196, down from 727,144 in the same window of 2025. Addresses holding any bitcoin rose to 57,273,532 on Oct 16, 2026, from 54,463,944 on Oct 16, 2025 (Coin Metrics, Oct 16).[4]

Address counts are not people. One person may use dozens of addresses, because wallets are advised to use a new address for each payment, and an exchange holds many customers' coins in shared addresses.[5][6]

Hashrate, the computing power securing the network, was about 1,040 EH/s on mempool.space's current estimate on October 17, 2026. The 30-day average of Coin Metrics daily estimates for Sep 17–Oct 16, 2026 was 975.7 EH/s, against 1,057.4 EH/s in the same window of 2025 (Coin Metrics, Oct 16).[7][4]

Public Lightning capacity was about 3,546 BTC across 29,950 channels in mempool.space's snapshot for October 18, 2026. Other trackers see the network from their own nodes and report different totals, and private channels are not counted.[8]

Ownership surveys

The Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), fielded in October 2025 with about 13,000 adults, found 10% of U.S. adults used cryptocurrency in the prior year, up from 8% in 2024 but below 12% in 2021. Nine percent bought or held it as an investment.[3]

Pew Research Center found 19% of U.S. adults have ever invested in, traded or used a cryptocurrency, in a January 2026 survey of 8,512 adults, compared with 16% in 2021. Men (27%) were far more likely than women (11%) to say so.[10]

Gallup found 9% of U.S. adults owned cryptocurrency in June 2026, down from 14% in 2025. Among investors with $10,000 or more in investable assets, ownership fell to 11% from 17%, and 63% called crypto a “very risky” investment.[11]

The numbers differ because the questions do: last-year use, ever used and own now measure different things, and Gallup's poll came after a steep price fall. All three ask about cryptocurrency in general, not bitcoin alone.[3][10][11]

Payments and merchants

Spending is the smallest slice. In the Fed's 2025 survey, 2% of U.S. adults used crypto to buy something or make a payment and 1% used it to send money to friends or family. The most cited reason, given by 26% of those users, was that the person or business receiving the money preferred crypto.[3]

Lightning is a payments network built on top of bitcoin. Its public capacity is in the low thousands of bitcoin (see above). Capacity is not payment volume, and we found no public source that measures Lightning payment volume across the whole network.[8]

BTCPay Server is a free, open-source, self-hosted payment processor. Merchants run it themselves, it charges no processing fee, and payments go straight to addresses from the merchant's own wallet.[35]

We found no reliable count of merchants that accept bitcoin. BTC Map, a volunteer project, tags places on OpenStreetMap that accept bitcoin, but listings are added by volunteers and are not audited, so treat its total (about 27,000 merchants in October 2026, see Spend bitcoin) as what's mapped, not a count of all merchants. El Salvador, where acceptance was mandatory from 2021 to 2025, is a cautionary data point: a household survey found bitcoin use was low and decreasing.[36][37][25]

A world view

Chainalysis's 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index ranks 117 countries on service flows, domestic peer-to-peer transfers, cross-border transfers and onchain balances for July 2025 to June 2026. The top five were Brazil, the United States, Nigeria, Japan and South Korea.[6]

The index covers all crypto, not bitcoin alone. Chainalysis says peer-to-peer activity is now 96% stablecoins, it debuted a new methodology this year, and it relies partly on web-traffic data to place exchange activity in countries. Rankings are not comparable with earlier years.[6]

Adoption timeline

The site timeline tags 5 events as adoption, each with a primary source. The latest:

  1. El Salvador reforms Bitcoin Law acceptance rules

  2. El Salvador Bitcoin Law takes effect

  3. El Salvador passes Bitcoin Law

  4. PayPal enables bitcoin buying

See all adoption events on the timeline →

Sources

  1. [1] iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), fund holdings file (holdings as of Oct 15, 2026)
  2. [2] Strategy Inc, Form 8-K filed Oct 13, 2026, Exhibit 99.1 (holdings as of Oct 11, 2026)
  3. [3] Federal Reserve Board, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025, Banking: Cryptocurrency (May 2026)
  4. [4] Coin Metrics Community Network Data (free API; AdrActCnt, AdrBalCnt, HashRate)
  5. [5] bitcoin.org, “Protect your privacy” (use a new address for each payment)
  6. [6] Chainalysis, “2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index” (free blog post, Sep 23, 2026)
  7. [7] mempool.space mining API, hashrate (current estimate, Oct 17, 2026)
  8. [8] mempool.space Lightning statistics API (snapshot dated Oct 18, 2026; checked Oct 18, 2026)
  9. [9] Lightning BOLT #7, P2P Node and Channel Discovery (announce_channel flag)
  10. [10] Pew Research Center, “About 1 in 5 Americans have used crypto; Republicans’ use has ticked up” (Jun 8, 2026)
  11. [11] Gallup, “U.S. Crypto Ownership Falls From 2025 High” (Sep 21, 2026)
  12. [12] SEC, Release No. 34-99306, Order Granting Accelerated Approval… to List and Trade Bitcoin-Based Commodity-Based Trust Shares and Trust Units (Jan 10, 2024)
  13. [13] SEC, Chair Gary Gensler, “Statement on the Approval of Spot Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Products” (Jan 10, 2024)
  14. [14] Farside Investors, Bitcoin ETF Flow – All Data (free aggregator; US$m, through Oct 16, 2026)
  15. [15] iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), fund page (key facts as of Oct 16, 2026)
  16. [16] Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB), fund page (holdings as of Oct 15, 2026)
  17. [17] ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB), fund page (risk statement)
  18. [18] BitcoinTreasuries.net, public company leaderboard (free aggregator; viewed Oct 17, 2026)
  19. [19] MARA Holdings (MARA), Form 10-Q for Q2 2026
  20. [20] Metaplanet (3350.T), TSE (TDnet) disclosure, Oct 5, 2026
  21. [21] Coinbase (COIN), Form 10-Q for Q2 2026
  22. [22] Tesla (TSLA), Form 10-Q for Q2 2026
  23. [23] Block (XYZ), Form 10-Q for Q2 2026
  24. [24] National Bitcoin Office of El Salvador, wallet API for the published ONBTC addresses
  25. [25] El Salvador Supreme Court jurisprudence archive: Bitcoin Law and reforms (Decree No. 199, Jan 29, 2025)
  26. [26] IMF Press Release 26/316, El Salvador: Second and Third Reviews under the EFF (Oct 1, 2026)
  27. [27] Decrypt, “Bhutan Pledges 10,000 Bitcoin Worth $1B to Fund Mindfulness City” (Dec 2025)
  28. [28] 3iQ and Gelephu Mindfulness City, joint press release (Jul 30, 2026)
  29. [29] The Bhutanese, “DHI Clarifies That It Retains More Than 10,000 Bitcoins and is Mining at Full Capacity” (Jul 4, 2026)
  30. [30] CoinDesk, “Bhutan ‘doesn’t recall’ selling any bitcoin, disputing widely-tracked $1 billion BTC drawdown” (May 16, 2026)
  31. [31] The White House, Executive Order “Establishment of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile” (Mar 6, 2025)
  32. [32] Federal Register, Executive Order 14233 document 2025-03992 (published Mar 11, 2025)
  33. [33] The White House, fact sheet on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (Mar 6, 2025)
  34. [34] National Bitcoin Office of El Salvador, treasury tracker (bitcoin.gob.sv)
  35. [35] BTCPay Server, project home page
  36. [36] BTC Map, home page (places tagged on OpenStreetMap)
  37. [37] Alvarez, Argente and Van Patten, “Are Cryptocurrencies Currencies? Bitcoin as Legal Tender in El Salvador,” NBER Working Paper 29968 (2022)

Checked Oct 17, 2026 · Timeline · Treasury companies · El Salvador