There is currently a lot of fear and uncertainty in the financial markets, which is caused by Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine. At first, cryptocurrencies seemed to suffer a lot from this situation, but the opposite appears to be true. Crypto is performing unbelievably well right now, especially when compared to the stock market.

People are citing all kinds of reasons for the overperforming crypto market, like Russia or the U.S. buying lots of Bitcoin (BTC), but none of those reasons are confirmed. A more obvious reason could be the increasing amount of wallets holding Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH). According to Glassnode, these amounts have even reached new all-time highs.

Record number of non-zero Bitcoin addresses

The amount of non-zero Bitcoin addresses, i.e. wallets holding more than 0 BTC, has reached a new all-time high (ATH). There are currently 40,276,163 non-zero Bitcoin addresses, bypassing the previous ATH of 40,275,801.

Also, the number of investors holding at least 0.1 BTC (~ €3,900) has reached a new all-time high. According to Glassnode, there are currently 3,349,275 wallets containing more than 0.1 BTC.

Record number of non-zero Ethereum addresses

We see the same trend in Ethereum (ETH). For instance, the number of non-zero ETH addresses just reached a new record of 75,960,332. The number of ETH addresses with at least 0.1 ETH (~ €260) has reached a new record as well. It currently stands at 6,960,421 addresses. For addresses with at least 0.01 ETH, there‘s a new ATH of 21,929,193.

Glassnode reports that smaller wallets in particular are accumulating "aggressively" this time around while it is normally the “whales”, wallets holding a big amount of crypto already.

This may have to do with the situation in Ukraine. According to data on transaction volumes, Russians are currently converting their crashing ruble into Bitcoin and Ukrainians are also converting their falling grivna into crypto. Nevertheless, macroeconomic developments will mainly determine the direction of prices in the coming period.