This entire week Bitcoin has been constantly on the up and down. We started December at about $7,500 only to fall to $7,070 level in the following days.

At the time of writing, BTC/USD has been trading at $7,540 with 24 hours gains of 2.52% as per Coincodex while down by nearly 19% in the past month. Volume, however, is still extremely low just like the rest of the week at $270 million.

The lack of volume behind this surge is why there is no confidence in this move. It also means any large transaction is having an outsize impact on price.

“I get it, price has moved up. But It seems like everyone is immediately hyper-bullish. First 7800, then 8200. Until then you are mistaking volatility for meaning,” says trader Cantering Clark.

~4.87% of all BTC Addresses have a Non-zero Balance

However, while the price may have yet to give any strong bull signals yet, there is one chart that is painting a very bullish picture.

The total number of Bitcoin addresses that hold some amount of BTC, are non-zero, has hit an all-time high at more than 28 million addresses, surpassing the previous record made in early January 2018.

As Glassnode puts it, “There have never been this many addresses holding btc in the history of Bitcoin.”

Source: Glassnode

When non-zero addresses hit ATH, BTC price was around its peak at about $20,000. But in the next two months, these addresses reduced by about 7 million while the price dropped to $8,800 level.

Ever since then, these addresses have been on the rise and hit an ATH recently while the price is trading around $7,500.

“~4.87% ( ~28.3M out of ~586M) of all BTC addresses have a non-zero balance,” notes on-chain data platform TokenAnalyst.

This metric is one of the best ways to provide us with the total number of Bitcoin users. However, it has its limitations in the way that one user can have many wallets, one wallet can hold many addresses, and one address can hold many UTXOs.

Also, many users keep their BTC with exchanges and custodian meaning one single address is holding the funds of many customers.

But they both kind of offset each other because while the first point gives us with more addresses, the second one undercounts the actual numbers.

So, this metric gives us the nearest if not the best idea of the Bitcoin adoption growth.

Addresses with a Balance of more than 0.1 BTC, 1 BTC & 100k BTC Slightly Down

Meanwhile, addresses with a balance of more than 0.1 BTC have are down to 2.817 million from its peak of 2.847 million addresses in mid-October. The same is the case for addresses with more than 1 BTC, they are down to 778k BTC from all-time of 788k from late October, this year.

Those that have over 10 BTC have taken a dive to 152.6k address from 157k in September. There are just over 16k addresses that has more than 100 BTC which is down from 18.5k in July 2017.

Interestingly, addresses that are holding over 100k BTC have risen to its ATH at 2,187 on Sept. 28, 2019, and are currently at 2,135.

The richest bitcoin address — a lot of which are exchanges, custodians, and OTC — that have over 10k BTC is currently at just 107, down from its ATH of 125 in Nov. 2018, from where it took a drop to 97 BTC in mid-December 2018 when the price hit its bottom at $3,200.