Bitcoin (BTC) Wallets With 10-10,000 BTC Hit Record 20,338, Santiment Data Shows

A Record for the 10 to 10,000 Band

A record 20,338 wallets now hold between 10 and 10,000 Bitcoin market's core asset Bitcoin (BTC), the highest count ever logged for that band, according to an October 15 post from on-chain analytics firm Santiment. The milestone arrived during a stretch of volatile trading in which the Bitcoin price and its market cap swung in both directions, yet the address count climbed steadily rather than with the tape. Santiment's series shows the count rising almost continuously since mid-July, and the pace held even as smaller holders sold rallies. The census is a point-in-time snapshot, not a transaction log: Santiment tracks balance changes inside the same band as a separate series, and the two records appeared in posts just over a week apart. That separation matters, because the wallet count says nothing by itself about whether coins entered or left the cohort. The band draws attention because it captures the mid-sized cohort traders label whales, holders large enough that their distribution shows up in daily flow data, while excluding the exchange hot wallets and custodial pools that dominate the very largest addresses. Wallets at the bottom of the band hold a substantial personal position; at the top, they approach the scale of institutional treasuries. The figure carries limits that Santiment itself spelled out. One investor can split a stash across many addresses, so a new wallet is not automatically a new holder. Exchanges reshuffle internal custody and open fresh deposit addresses, which lifts the count without any purchase taking place. A transfer between two personal wallets registers as movement while revealing nothing about intent, and commentary on the past 180 days of flows has noted that wallet-to-wallet transfers and custody changes land inside movement totals. Coins moved off an exchange into self-custody are, likewise, not automatically beyond a seller's reach. The record establishes that more addresses sit in the band, not who controls them or why they grew.

86,702 BTC Added in Three Weeks

The balance side of the same cohort fills in where the coins came from. In an October 6 post, Santiment tallied 86,702 Bitcoin (BTC) accumulated by wallets in the 10 to 10,000 band across the preceding three weeks, a haul recorded while the price was still swinging hard. Timing is the part of the dataset drawing the most attention: the accumulation coincided with retail profit-taking, so smaller holders were selling strength into a cohort large enough to absorb the supply. Santiment flagged the divergence between the two groups explicitly, with small holders trimming into strength while the band's balances rose week after week. The firm's reading is that this ownership shift, large balances growing while small-holder positions shrink, resembles the structure seen in earlier Bitcoin advances, though it stops short of calling the pattern predictive. The comparison is directional rather than dated; the firm drew the parallel without attaching a specific price path to it. A parallel movement points in the same direction. Large holders have been withdrawing Bitcoin from exchanges into personal wallets, and coins that sit outside exchange order books are less immediately available to hit the bid, which trims the float a would-be seller can tap at short notice. Santiment's posts treated the exchange exodus as a separate observation from the accumulation, one flow that can coincide with it without being caused by it. Flow research published this quarter reached a compatible conclusion from the other side of the ledger, finding the United States became a net Bitcoin (BTC) importer on a 53,200 BTC institutional inflow. The accumulation total rests on the same attribution assumptions as the wallet count: cluster analysis decides which addresses belong to exchanges, custodians and private holders, and a mislabeled cluster shifts coins between categories without any trade taking place. A wallet in self-custody today can still be sold tomorrow.

The Trail Ends at Self-Custody

Two Santiment records, one cohort, two different measures. An address count can inflate when holders split holdings or exchanges open new custody wallets; adding 86,702 BTC requires coins actually landing in the band. The load-bearing fact in the two posts is the three-week balance growth, with the record address count as corroborating detail. The trail the data records ends with coins leaving exchange custody for these wallets; whether the cohort keeps them or redistributes them is the next print to watch. Until that lands, the levels mapped in Bitcoin technical analysis stay secondary to the flow itself. Macro still steers the tape: Fidelity's researchers measured a record correlation with 10-year real rates above 0.6, so even a sustained accumulation run is one input among several. Unlike ETF creations, wallet accumulation has no settlement calendar to verify against, which makes the next Santiment update the first real check on whether the cohort held.