Willy Woo Puts Global Bitcoin Ownership at Roughly 5 Percent of the World

On-chain analyst Willy Woo published a country-by-country breakdown of Bitcoin ownership this week, putting global adoption at roughly 4.5 to 6 percent of the world's population, or somewhere between 370 million and 500 million people.

WHO ACTUALLY OWNS BITCOIN

India tops Woo's table by sheer headcount, with an estimated 68 million holders, more than any other country. That number comes from a relatively low ownership rate of 4.6 percent of India's population, which ranks 12th among the 25 countries in Woo's data. Vietnam leads on rate at 17 percent, followed by the United Arab Emirates at 16 percent, Argentina at 15 percent, and the United States, Turkey and the Philippines tied at 14 percent each.

The United States comes in second by headcount with roughly 50 million holders. China follows at an estimated 33 million, or 2.3 percent of its population. Indonesia's ownership rate runs surprisingly high at 7.6 percent, implying 22 million holders, and Brazil sits at 9.6 percent, or about 21 million people.

HOW WOO BUILT THE NUMBERS

Woo stitched the estimate together from several sources rather than one survey. He used Glassnode's on-chain entity clustering for the earliest years, Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance benchmark studies from 2016 through 2020 for exchange users, Crypto.com's annual market-sizing reports and a global web-user survey from GWI, then projected forward from the most recent known growth rate. Woo did not cite a specific source for the country-level table itself.

In a follow-up post, Woo compared Bitcoin's roughly 5 percent global ownership rate to his own estimates of about 4.5 percent for gold and 4 percent for the S&P 500, placing all three on the same adoption curve. He argued the real question is where Bitcoin's curve tops out, since gold and the S&P 500 function purely as investments while Bitcoin also gets used where capital controls or high inflation make holding it directly useful.

WHERE THE NUMBERS GET SHAKY

Other estimates land in a similar range but disagree on specifics. Crypto.com's own market sizing puts global Bitcoin owners closer to 365 million, near the low end of Woo's band. None of these figures can capture holders who never touch a KYC exchange, and Woo's methodology leans on exchange account data that likely undercounts self-custodied holders while potentially overcounting people who hold small amounts across multiple platforms.

Whatever the true number, the gap between India's first-place headcount and its 12th-place rate is really a story about population size. A 4.6 percent adoption rate applied to 1.4 billion people produces a bigger raw number than a 17 percent rate applied to Vietnam's roughly 100 million.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.