In a little more than a year, the number of bitcoin wallets hosted by the most popular wallet service provider has tripled.
The number of bitcoin wallets hosted by the London-based Blockchain.info has been increasing steadily over the last year. Having passed the milestone of one million bitcoin wallets in January 2014, and of two million in August 2014, Blockchain has now announced its three-millionth wallet on Monday, February 23rd, 2015. In the past month alone, the number of wallets has grown by 6%. The second most-popular wallet service, Coinbase, has 2.5 million bitcoin wallets.
The news generated a mixed response on Reddit. While some were enthusiastic, a user expressed their concern about excessive centralization: “The more blockchain.info wallets there are, the more centralized and vulnerable Bitcoin becomes”. Some were skeptical about the number of unique customers, remarking, for instance: “One user can create as many wallets as they want. Just something to mention before we get too excited”. Indeed, some users claimed they have ten or more blockchain wallets.
For privacy reasons, the company does not disclose how many of the wallet accounts are active. Still, according to CEO Peter Smith, most users are unique, joining the ranks of Blockchain.info customers from countries such as Argentina and “the periphery of the eurozone” where many people have lost their trust in local financial systems. As CoinFox has written before, bitcoin is very popular in Ukraine.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the success of Blockchain.info in developing countries, where demand for bitcoin is the strongest, could be explained by its relatively higher accessibility in comparison with such wallet providers as Coinbase, Circle, and Xapo. Unlike these companies, says WSJ, Blockchain does not give its customers the option of buying bitcoins with dollars, encouraging them instead to purchase bitcoins from other sources and then transfer them to their Blockchain.info wallet. Since it does not deal in conventional currencies, Blockchain.info is not subject to the kind of heavy regulation its competitors are.
