Active Addresses

Active Addresses plots the daily count of unique Bitcoin addresses that transacted — either as the input or the output of a confirmed transaction — against the 30-day simple moving average that suppresses single-day operational noise. The thicker line is the SMA; the lighter underlay is the raw daily count, surfaced so single-day spikes from exchange reshuffles or inscription waves are visible rather than smoothed away. Bitcoin’s USD price runs muted on the log left axis for cycle context.

Today’s daily count is 690,258; the 30-day average is 624,254; the year-over-year change is −14.7%. The series stretches from 17 Aug 2010 through the most recent close on 30 Apr 2026.

For each daily close t:

AA(t) = | { addr : addr appears as input or output of a confirmed tx on day t } |
sma30(t) = mean(AA(t−29) ... AA(t))
yoy(t) = sma30(t) / sma30(t−365) − 1

An address transacting twenty times on the same UTC day counts once. Coinbase issuance rows with no sender address are excluded. The 30-day window is the conventional smoothing choice — long enough to suppress operational single-day spikes (an exchange consolidating sweeps, a wallet provider rotating its receive prefix), short enough to retain cycle-length resolution.

The regime bucket comes from the year-over-year change on the 30-day SMA: Expansion above +30%, Contracting below −10%, Stable in between. Reconstruction details, including the address-clustering caveats that affect every active-address dashboard, live on the methodology page.

Three useful lenses, in increasing analytic value. Level reading. Today’s 30-day average against the 500–1,100k range that has bracketed every post-2017 daily print: above 900k flags cycle-top territory; below 600k flags cycle-bottom or post-Runes-decoupling territory. YoY reading. The headline regime bucket; useful as a cycle-momentum filter, noisy near the 30-percent threshold. Cycle-aligned reading. The peak table below puts each cycle’s maximum SMA in price context — the lens that surfaces the post-2023 decoupling without ambiguity.

Reading every cycle anchor against the live series surfaces three eras. Pre-2018 cycle tops printed dramatic SMA peaks; the 2021 cycle topped twice with the address set already flattening relative to 2017; the 2024 cycle decoupled fully, with the Runes launch event spike clearly visible in the daily underlay even though the SMA continued to drift. Prices are our own daily closes; counts are the raw daily and 30-day-SMA values from the underlying series.

The cleanest way to see the chart’s shifting meaning is the per-cycle peak 30-day SMA together with Bitcoin’s closing price on the day of that peak. Each cycle’s “USD-per-active-address” is the price divided by the SMA — the implied price growth per unit of address-set activity. The ratio rises by an order of magnitude across cycles; the address set itself does not.

Three observations carry through the cycle-peak table. First, the peak 30-day SMA stopped growing after 2021. The 2017 peak SMA, the 2021 dual peaks, and the 2024 pre-halving window all printed in a tight band of roughly 900k to 1.2M addresses per day — despite price tripling between cycles. The addressable bound is set by block weight and average transaction shape, not by adoption.

Second, USD-per-active-address has risen by roughly an order of magnitude across cycles. The 2017 reading printed in the high teens; the 2021 readings in the mid-to-high fifties; the 2024 reading in the high sixties. Each cycle, the same unit of base-layer address activity has been assigned threefold more market value. The chart records this as price-axis-and-address-axis divergence; the table states it as one number per cycle.

Third, the post-2023 window introduced a different kind of distortion. Inscriptions — beginning with Casey Rodarmor’s January 2023 Ordinals genesis — and Runes — the token protocol that launched at the April 2024 halving in block 840,000 — both consume base-layer block weight without growing the unique-address footprint. Many inscription transactions reuse a small handful of inscriber and marketplace addresses for thousands of mints. Address counts compress while transaction counts and fees rise; the active-address chart diverges from the transaction count and the fee revenue charts in ways no prior cycle exhibited. The chart still measures something — the address-set side of base-layer activity — but reading it as a unitary “adoption” signal in 2026 is a category error.

For an investor. Active addresses no longer carry a clean adoption signal. Treat the chart as one input among several: rising or falling year-over-year on the 30-day SMA tells you something about base-layer participation cadence, but the modern decoupling means it does not tell you about the institutional flow lane at all. Pair with ETF flows and exchange flows for the post-2024 institutional read.

For a network operator or builder. The chart is a useful base-layer capacity gauge. Sustained 30-day averages near or above one million addresses per day are the operational signal that block weight is being fully bid for. Pair with daily transaction count and daily fees to separate capacity-bound from demand-bound regimes.

For a researcher or analyst. The decoupling story is documented across the cycle-peak table. The address-clustering caveat — one entity can run thousands of addresses, and one address can serve thousands of users — is structural, not stochastic, and the clustering convention any particular dashboard uses should be checked before cross-publisher comparison. The series and methodology are reproducible from the methodology page.

Address ≠ user. Custodial exchange hot wallets route transactions for thousands of customers through a single address, which under-counts retail activity. A privacy-conscious user can rotate through a fresh address for every receive, which over-counts that one user. Both biases are material, and the mix shifts cycle to cycle as custody share migrates between exchanges, ETFs, and self-custody.

Inscription protocols reuse addresses. Ordinals inscription activity (early 2023 onward) and the Runes launch (April 2024) consume base-layer block weight at high transaction counts but with significant address reuse — a single marketplace address mints, transfers, and settles thousands of inscriptions. The active-address signal compresses while transaction count and fee revenue rise; pages reading the chart as a clean adoption proxy in this window are reading it incorrectly.

Layer-2 activity is invisible. Lightning Network routing, sidechain (Liquid, Rootstock) transfers, and federated-bridge activity do not touch the base layer and do not appear in the count. Lightning capacity in the tens of thousands of BTC routed annually is real economic flow that the active-address chart cannot see by design.

The pre-2014 history is sparse. Address-set telemetry on the first three years of the chain reflects much smaller absolute participant counts than the post-2014 era; comparisons across the boundary should weigh structural growth, not just headline-number ratios.

Canonical questions from Google’s “People also ask” block for bitcoin active addresses, answered against the data on this page.