Exchange Balances

What this measures

This chart estimates the total amount of bitcoin held on exchange addresses, expressed in millions of BTC. The data comes from Coin Metrics, which adds up the balances of the hot and cold wallets it attributes to the exchanges it tracks. The figure is best read against circulating supply: it shows what share of existing bitcoin has been handed to an intermediary that controls the keys.

An estimate built on address labeling

Nothing on the blockchain says an address belongs to an exchange. Data providers build their own lists, using chain analysis heuristics and information published by the exchanges themselves. Each provider has its own method and coverage, and their figures can differ widely for the same date.

Those lists change over time. When an exchange is newly identified, its bitcoin suddenly appears in the series even though it was there all along. When it moves its reserves to addresses that are not yet labeled, the coins seem to vanish. Abrupt steps on the chart are therefore often a matter of methodology rather than user behavior. And the balance says nothing about liabilities: an exchange can hold a lot of bitcoin without holding all the bitcoin it owes its customers.

A decline is not always a return to self-custody

Falling balances are often read as coins heading back to self-custody, into wallets whose users hold the keys. That is only part of the story. Since US spot bitcoin ETFs were approved in January 2024, some of those outflows may simply be going to the funds’ custodians, whose addresses are not necessarily classified as exchange addresses. Someone who owns an ETF share holds no keys at all.

“Not your keys, not your coins”: the phrase is a reminder that bitcoin left on an exchange is only a claim on that exchange. Mt. Gox showed it in 2014. The collapse of FTX in November 2022 drove the point home on a much larger scale: withdrawals were halted and customers became creditors in a bankruptcy case. In the aftermath, several major exchanges published proofs of reserves, without always showing the state of their liabilities.

Custody also has a surveillance dimension. Bitcoin bought on a regulated platform is tied to an identity verified through KYC. Since January 1, 2026, the EU’s DAC8 directive also requires providers to pass their users’ identity and transaction data on to tax authorities.

🪙 Bull Bitcoin drags DAC8 before the Conseil d’État to have it canceled and draws a line in the sand

Withdrawing your bitcoin from an exchange removes the counterparty risk. The record of how you bought it stays.