The Scope of Crypto Winter: 70K BTC Millionaires Shook Out in 2022

With the turnover of the new year, Bitcoin price analyst predictions are out. Meanwhile, a survey of the damage from the protracted 2022 crypto winter shows 70K fewer BTC wallet addresses with $1 million USD worth of Bitcoin or more.

It has now been over a year since Bitcoin’s (BTC) last all-time price high of $68,789 on November 10, 2021. Since then, at today’s fair market price on crypto exchanges of around $16,900 for the coin, the Bitcoin price had declined 75 % from the record high.

That was just 13 months ago, but the return on the investment depends entirely on the individual cost basis and whether it’s in a loss or a profit at BTC’s current prices. They have remained consistently below $20,000 now since September. Crypto prices across markets keep taking massive write-downs as more and more bad news about CeFi insolvencies and DeFi hacks roll out.

Bitcoin Price Predictions for 2023 Are Out

With the price tumultuously tumbling all these twelve months past and since the Nov 2021 ATH, investors are looking for that relief rally. Before September, they were hoping that the powerful psychological key support at $20,000 would persist until another bull market.

Now they’re just holding out hope that they will be able to make it back to $20,000. Meanwhile, as regulatory consensus firms up, institutional investors with deep pockets in pursuit of high-performing ROI are poised to buoy BTC markets’ fortunes.

One estimate analyst, that of Mark Mobius, who made his name trading at Franklin Templeton Investments, is that Bitcoin price will dive another 70% to $10,000. He bases his guess on rising interest rates and tightening central bank policy over the next year.

Still, other analysts have optimistically bullish projections. They range from $50,000 by Q3 or Q4, according to Prof. Carol Alexander (Sussex University), to as high as $250,000 per BTC, according to venture capitalist Tim Draper.

Draper reasons that when women begin to adopt Bitcoin, that’s when the price will make this moonshot movement. He says he expects it by mid-2023:

“My assumption is that since women control 80% of retail spending, and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women that the dam is about to break.”

In the meanwhile, the on-chain data reveal a drastically different Bitcoin ecosystem than the one flush with capital and volume during the bubble that ended in 2021.

On Chain Data Gloomy for Investors

It was a different picture in May 2021 when crypto summer was still raging. At that time, the total market capitalization of Bitcoin was $1 trillion.

Back then, on-chain data revealed that the number of Bitcoin addresses with $1,000,000 or more USD worth of Bitcoin held had crossed the 100,000 threshold.

That represented a 400% increase from the 25,000 level five months earlier.

Today it’s a different story. There are now 70,000 fewer Bitcoin addresses holding one million USD or more worth of the gold standard cryptocurrency over the last year. Whereas the blockchain started off 2022 with over 99,000 millionaire addresses, it enters Jan 2023 with some 24,391 millionaire wallet addresses.

That doesn’t necessarily mean there are that many fewer millionaires. It is possible that they have spread their holdings out over more addresses.

But overall, it’s attributable to the deep freeze on crypto prices. If they swing back again, with renewed interest from retail and professional investors, especially at big institutional funds, those numbers will go right back up again.