Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone! I am new to Bitcoin. I got a question about Grayscale. As I know that Grayscale holds a great number of bitcoins, while it does not have a public-known bitcoin wallet address. For example, many exchanges have a public-known bitcoin wallet address, like 34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHoCNxv4Twseo for binance.

My question is that can we know the bitcoin wallet address of Grayscale by tracking the change of the number of bitcoins it holds every day and tried to find a or some bitcoin wallets which have a similar change to it? And also, how does the public know 34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHoCNxv4Twseo, this address belong to binance? I got this information from the bitinfochart-the richest bitcoin wallet, but how does they know it?

Great thanks in advance.

Grayscale is using cold storage with Coinbase Custody for holding all those bitcoins, but they are not really owners of those Bitcoins and funds are not stored in just one address for sure.
You can't really compare exchanges like Binance with Grayscale and other similar services.


There is no address you can track as far as I know but you can track their holdings using several website sources like Official Grayscale Website (https://grayscale.co/gaap-metrics/) and Bybt Grayscale (https://www.bybt.com/Grayscale).
According to those links Grayscale is currently holding around 654K BTC worth $38.2B.

The answer to your question is actually very easy, all you had to do was visit the official website that says the following :


This simply means that Coinbase Custody takes care of all their assets, and that they are stored in their cold wallets.

As for the addresses and identification of their owners, this is sometimes possible if the owner does not want to or cannot hide it, and this is often the case with crypto exchanges. There is a website that tries to link addresses to owners, unfortunately I can't remember the exact name at the moment.

Edit : here is the link, just copy address and see whether it will be connected to a service -> https://www.walletexplorer.com/

If you want to know more about Grayscale I suggest you visit this thread -> Everything you wanted to know about Grayscale BTC Trust but were afraid to ask! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5256529.0) started by @fillippone

Those wallet explorers collect data from various sources, such as users' submission of their deposit address (or by creating a dummy account to collect data from a specific exchange). Collecting data from an exchange is quite easy since there are various ways to do it, and the data source is usually public, while private companies might protect their privacy and do not disclose their address except to their customers or investors.

Sometimes companies do publicly mention some of there wallet addresses or some of their users just connect it from the transactions whether they are depositing or withdrawing which these companies are obviously using these wallet addresses. But I don't think they do that for their cold storages for security purposes as these Bitcoins or cryptocurrencies are really for the purposes of storing their reserves.  Also you can't really link any wallet address to an identity not unless the owner of that wallet has make it known to the public, that's why you can get the data to the wallet addresses who has the largest quantity of Bitcoin but you don't exactly know who owns these wallets.

Thanks for the information. This really enlighten me because I was once assume that grayscale holding bitcoin in one place. But after your words, it is really risky to put all the money in one place even bitcoin is proven to be encrypt and safer than cash. 654000 bitcoin is a gigantic number and owners will commit suicide if they accidentally let those bitcoin fall into the hand of bad guys. I also assume that exchange are lack of security than an investment firms.

It seems that we can't trace whose wallet it belongs to, because what we know is that currently wallet transactions are not mentioned along with existing names. so I don't think we will find our destination wallet easily

And I don't think it is our business to know such details. You will just get a head ache figuring out what are their addresses and you still come up empty handed. For now, let's be grateful that they are investing big in crypto, in bitcoin in particular. They drive good price in the market and we are not ignoring their contribution to the crypto market. We can't get any value anyway, upon learning their addresses, right? It is their assets not ours, so better look out for your assets instead.

OP seems to be a trader for sure. Identifying the move of Bitcoin could be considered an indicator for some price action of Bitcoin, especially when it is transferred to some exchange addresses, it could be able to sell anytime. On-chain analysis is what we called this, identifying the addresses of some entity and the move of Bitcoin (e.g. inflow/outflow on some exchanges).

I gotta wonder, how many people could access the btc grayscale stores in the coinbase custody?  Like i can't imagine one person having access to it right?  Thus it has to be a few people in coinbase where they each need each other to get access to it?

There is no way to know the owner unless they announce it publicly their wallet address. Also tried this look up if it really gets the owner name to confirm if its genuine i tried my BTC address although can't see the name you can see how much it contains -> https://bitcoinwhoswho.com/ (https://bitcoinwhoswho.com/)

Unless you could hacked Coinbase and do database search about grayscale or manually copy paste all those whale wallets found in - > https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html (https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html)