In just one year, the number of bitcoin wallets hosted by the most popular wallet service provider, has doubled again.
The bitcoin company famous for providing the technical data on bitcoin in real time will soon celebrate its fourth birthday – it was founded in London on 30 August 2011. And just two weeks before this date, on Sunday 16 August, it reached an important milestone. The four-year-old company has now four million wallets, more than any other bitcoin wallet provider in the world. California-based Coinbase comes second with 3.8 million wallets.
Despite many observers speaking about the exponential growth of the number of wallets, for the last year and a half it grew, in fact, in a linear fashion, which can be very well seen from the graph in the Blockchain.info blog. Having passed the threshold of one million bitcoin wallets in January 2014, and of two million in August 2014, Blockchain has announced its three-millionth wallet in February 2015, an event covered by CoinFox. The number of wallets has doubled in one year.
Of course, four million wallets do not mean four million users. Some Reddit users claimed they have ten or more blockchain wallets. The exact number of users is hard to determine because Blockchain.info does not collect personal data of its customers. Coinbase claims its 3.8 million wallets belong to 2.5 million individual users.
Previously, when asked about his customers, Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain.info told that most new users came from countries such as Argentina and “the periphery of the eurozone” where many people have lost their trust in local financial systems. The success of the Blockchain.info wallet in developing countries could be explained by its relatively higher accessibility in comparison with such wallet providers as Coinbase, Circle, and Xapo. It does not give its customers the option of buying bitcoins with fiat currency, encouraging them instead to purchase bitcoins from other sources and then transfer them to their Blockchain.info wallet. Since it does not deal in fiat currencies, Blockchain.info is not subject to the same heavy regulation as its competitors.
In the beginning of August, Blockchain.info has been selected by the British Prime Minister David Cameron to participate with other UK tech companies in a trade mission to Asia.
Alexey Tereshchenko
