Almost 13 years ago, Laszlo Hanyecz made history by purchasing two pizzas for a whopping 10,000 Bitcoin. Little did he know that in 2023 those 10,000 BTC would be worth over $268 million.

Suffice it to say, major cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH have gone up in value, by a lot. So, the people that held onto their crypto investments over the years became millionaires, thus the term “crypto millionaires” was born.

Today, anyone who owns more than $1 million USD worth of crypto assets can be considered a crypto millionaire. Let’s analyze the public data we have to figure out how many of these crypto millionaires there are.

The Number of Crypto Millionaires

Here’s how many crypto millionaires there are for two of the most popular cryptocurrencies:

Bitcoin

The current market value for 1 BTC is over 27,200 USD. So, in order to qualify as a crypto millionaire, you’d need almost 36.6 Bitcoin in your possession.

At this price, we can estimate that there are about 71,800 wallet addresses that hold more than $1 million worth of Bitcoin. More than 5,400 of these addresses are multi-millionaires with more than $10 million worth of BTC.

At the time of writing, the largest wallet holds 248,597 BTC which has a valuation of over $6.7 billion USD.

Ethereum

At the time of writing, the market value of 1 ETH is a bit over $1,786. With this price, anyone with more than 560 ETH will be a crypto millionaire.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find the exact number of wallets that hold more than 560 Ethereum. But, after analyzing the data available on Etherscan, we can confirm that there are at least 10,000 wallets with over $1 million USD in ETH. The actual number can be noticeably larger than this.

The largest wallet currently holds 17,898,631 ETH which is the equivalent of over 31.9 billion US dollars.

The limit of our estimations

We cannot know exactly how many crypto “millionaires” there are. Even if we knew precisely how many wallets hold more than a million USD in crypto assets, our estimate would still be a bit off. This is because one person can easily own multiple wallets to store their assets.

Plus, there can be an overlap between the wallet owners of different cryptocurrencies. So, the person could have two wallets, one with 36.6+ BTC, and the other with over 560 ETH.

There are also investors who may hold over a million dollars in stablecoins, or other altcoins, which we have not calculated here.

Factors That Affect the Number of Crypto Millionaires

Just like the crypto market itself, the number of crypto millionaires is constantly changing. The main factors behind these changes are:

Crypto prices

The volatility of crypto prices is likely the biggest reason behind the changing number of crypto millionaires. For example, the price of BTC was just above 5,000 USD in March 2020. At that time, a person would need almost 200 BTC to qualify as a crypto millionaire. However, at the time of writing, BTC is valued at over 27,200 USD, so anyone with more than 36.6 BTC is part of the millionaire club.

Government regulation

Many governments around the world have cracked down on crypto — making it illegal or severely restricted. Every time this happens, the number of crypto millionaires likely gets lower as investors from that country sell off their crypto assets to invest in something else.

Plus, a ban in major countries like China also negatively affects the price which further lowers the crypto millionaire statistic.

Scams and hacks

We’ve seen our fair share of crypto hacks and scams in the crypto space. In most cases, these malicious actors transfer the assets to multiple addresses to throw off future investigators. So, if a crypto millionaire gets hacked, their holdings will be divided into several smaller sections — reducing the number of total crypto millionaires.

How to become a crypto millionaire

We can safely say that becoming a crypto millionaire is the dream of most cryptocurrency investors/traders. Plus, after witnessing the boom of BTC and the overnight growth of DOGE back in 2021, this dream looks more plausible than ever.

In the past, there were three key ways of becoming a crypto millionaire, including:

Get in early

Nearly a decade ago, the price of bitcoin was around $12 per token. If you invested in crypto back then, you will experience a mind blowing 227,516% increase in your initial investment. So, buying just $4 worth of BTC back then would make you a crypto millionaire today.

Take risks

Many crypto millionaires reached their positions by taking huge risks. They invested a lot of money into cheap coins (sometimes meme coins, like DOGE or SHIB) in hopes that their price would go up. Fortunately for them, the price did go up — increasing the value of their investment to millions of dollars.

Be an innovator

A small number of crypto millionaires reached their position by becoming innovators in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space. 

Vitalik Buterin, for example, became the founder of Ethereum and held over a billion USD in ETH assets. Similarly, Changpeng Zhao (CZ) launched Binance which has become the largest crypto exchange in the world — launching CZ into his crypto billionaire status.

What you should do

From the three strategies we listed above, the most viable option that investors see is to take risks. However, we do not recommend this to anyone. Understand that for every success story you hear, there are thousands of investors who lost everything to a rug pull or a market crash.

Don’t engage in speculative crypto trading in the hopes of becoming a millionaire. You might get lucky, sure, but it’s far more likely that you’ll lose your entire investment.

That said, there is still hope for you to become a crypto millionaire. All you have to do is be smart with your money. Make long-term investments and use techniques like Dollar Cost Averaging to inch your way forward.

Above all, you should stay patient and not invest with the mindset of becoming a crypto millionaire overnight.

Conclusion

There are tens of thousands of crypto millionaires who hold BTC and ETH alone. This is not to mention those that own stablecoins like USDC or USDT.

As for the future, the prices of crypto assets will likely increase as they find more legitimacy as usable currencies. This will also bring more people under the umbrella of crypto millionaires.

If you want to be one of these millionaires, you cannot be hasty. Invest intelligently, and don’t fall for pump & dump schemes. With the right trading strategy and investing practices, you will have a better chance to cross the million-dollar mark.