Crypto-Microeconomics: The Distribution of Bitcoin Wealth Among Diverse Economic Agents

2026-07-03

AI Summary

Existing macroeconomic indicators fail to capture the micro-level inequality in Bitcoin wealth distribution. This study addresses this gap by introducing a microeconomic perspective and proposing an “on-chain cryptoeconomic observability framework.” Leveraging labeled blockchain data, it categorizes addresses into five types—services, abuse, malware, individuals, and benign—and employs Gini coefficients, concentration indices, and time-series analysis to systematically characterize wealth distribution. The findings reveal that service entities hold 75.15% of observable BTC, while abuse entities—comprising only 3.53% of all entities—control 24.26% of BTC. Wealth is highly concentrated within individual, abuse, and service categories, with the individual category exhibiting a Gini coefficient as high as 0.9993. This hierarchical structure remains remarkably stable over time, underscoring the structural persistence of the “whale effect” in Bitcoin’s ownership landscape.

Abstract

Bitcoin (BTC) wealth distribution is often studied with macro indicators like wallet balances, prices, network activity, fees, and hashrate. This letter proposes a "Crypto-Microeconomic Observability Framework" to examine micro-level Bitcoin wealth disparities across five labeled agent classes: Service, Abuse, Malware, Individuals, and Benign. Using descriptive, inequality, and longitudinal concentration metrics, we show that Bitcoin wealth is highly concentrated across major classes, consistent with a persistent "Whale-Effect". Service entities hold the largest share of observed BTC (75.15%), while Abuse controls a disproportionately large share relative to its entity count (24.26% of BTC vs. 3.53% of entities). Individuals, Abuse, and Service show near-maximal within-class inequality (e.g., Gini = 0.9993 for Individuals), and time-series analysis indicates these patterns persist. Overall, Bitcoin wealth among labeled economic agents remains structurally uneven and concentrated in a small subset of entities.

Problem

• Bitcoin wealth distribution
• economic agents
• wealth inequality
• Whale-Effect
• microeconomic observability

Innovation

• Crypto-Microeconomics
• Wealth Inequality
• Bitcoin Distribution
• Whale Effect
• Economic Agent Classification