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The Number of Bitcoin Millionaires Doubled in the Last Year
By Pete Grieve MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
Last summer was an optimal time to buy bitcoin — but it wasn’t the best period ever for investors.
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The dream of getting rich from crypto came true for thousands of investors in the past year.
From July 2023 to June 2024, the number of bitcoin millionaires increased to 85,400, up 111% in the one-year period, according to a new report from Henley & Partners, a U.K.-based residence and citizenship planning firm. Meanwhile, the number of overall cryptocurrency millionaires — those with crypto holdings of $1 million or more — increased 95%, rising to 172,300.
The price of bitcoin more than doubled over the same period, posting an impressive 105% increase in 12 months, reaching an all-time high of $73,157 in March. (Today, bitcoin is trading around $62,000.) The rally came after bitcoin experienced a major crash last summer partially due to concerns about high interest rates and regulation.
How does this recent growth compare to bitcoin’s strongest years ever? It turns out the highs have been even higher at several points in the past.
The best year ever to invest in bitcoin
Bitcoin’s best year was 2013 when prices surged more than 5,600%, according to Trading Economics. If you’d invested about $17,500 in bitcoin at the start of the year, you would’ve been a millionaire by year’s end. One coin, which was worth $13 as 2013 began, had shot up $754 by the end of the year.
Four years later, 2017 was another banner period for bitcoin, as the price surged more than 1,200% and hit $10,000 for the first time that November.
So even though investors have been rewarded during the recent rally, the real winners were those who put even small amounts of money into assets like bitcoin before crypto was on most people’s radar.
But bitcoin’s strong performance as of late is creating huge numbers of millionaires because far more people are invested now than they were during those early days of booming growth.
Here’s how Bitcoin has performed over the years.
- 2012: +164.4%
- 2013: +5605.1%
- 2014: -58.4%
- 2015: +38.2%
- 2016: +130%
- 2017: +1,247.3%
- 2018: -71.6%
- 2019: +94.4%
- 2020: +309.5%
- 2021: +62.4%
- 2022: -65.2%
- 2023: +162.8%
- 2024 (YTD): +41.2%
Why bitcoin prices are up
The approval of bitcoin and ethereum (ETH) spot ETFs earlier this year has made it easier for U.S. investors to get involved with crypto as part of a diversified investment portfolio. This change has driven recent price growth, according to Dominic Volek, group head of private clients at Henley.
“The cryptocurrency landscape of 2024 bears little resemblance to its predecessors,” Volek said in a release. “The long-awaited approval of spot bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs in the USA unleashed a torrent of institutional capital. Anticipation now builds for potential Solana ETFs joining the Wall Street party.” (Solana is the fifth largest crypto by market cap.)
In addition to tracking the number of crypto millionaires, Henley also reports that the number of centi-millionaires ($100 million+) increased 79% to 325 over the past year, while the number of crypto billionaires increased 27%, rising to 28.
“Of the six new crypto billionaires created over the past year, five came from Bitcoin, underscoring its dominant position when it comes to attracting long-term investors who buy large holdings,” Andrew Amoils, head of research at New World Wealth, said in the release.
If you were wondering: Anyone with the good fortune or uncanny foresight to have invested $81,000 in bitcoin in 2012 and held onto it would be a billionaire today.
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Pete Grieve is a New York-based reporter who covers personal finance news. At Money, Pete covers trending stories that affect Americans’ wallets on topics including car buying, insurance, housing, credit cards, retirement and taxes. He studied political science and photography at the University of Chicago, where he was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon. Pete began his career as a professional journalist in 2019. Prior to joining Money, he was a health reporter for Spectrum News in Ohio, where he wrote digital stories and appeared on TV to provide coverage to a statewide audience. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and CNN Politics. Pete received extensive journalism training through Report for America, a nonprofit organization that places reporters in newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities, and he attended the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in 2021. Pete has discussed his reporting in interviews with outlets including the Columbia Journalism Review and WBEZ (Chicago's NPR station). He’s been a panelist at the Chicago Headline Club’s FOIA Fest and he received the Institute on Political Journalism’s $2,500 Award for Excellence in Collegiate Reporting in 2017. An essay he wrote for Grey City magazine was published in a 2020 book, Remembering J. Z. Smith: A Career and its Consequence.