$100 B and Still Untouched: Satoshi’s Estimated Bitcoin Stash Just Got Bigger

Blockchain analytics firm Bitquery Research has released a new estimate of the Bitcoin created by the network’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. By reconstructing the historic Patoshi mining fingerprint, the team identified 1.17 million BTC tied to Satoshi – a value approaching $100 billion – and confirmed that virtually all of those coins have never moved.

Rebuilding the Patoshi Pattern

Bitquery indexed every block from Bitcoin’s first 54,316 blocks and applied its own classifier to grade each block’s likelihood of belonging to the Patoshi pattern. The researchers locked the resulting file hash before comparison and audited every satoshi covered by the pattern as of September 1 2026.

How the New Estimate Compares

• Sergio Demian Lerner (2013) – ~1.00 M BTC
• Lerner (2019) – ~1.10 M BTC
• BitMEX Research (2018) – 0.6–0.7 M BTC
• Whale Alert (2020) – 1.13 M BTC
• Jameson Lopp (2022) – 1.10 M BTC
• Other estimates – 0.97–1.11 M BTC

Bitquery’s figure of 1.17 M BTC is the highest to date.

Movement (or Lack Thereof) Since 2010

The audit found that 99.86 % of the identified stash – 1,023,352 BTC – has never moved as of block 965,051. Only 1,550 BTC have ever left the Patoshi pattern, and that activity occurred before December 2017. No coins that awakened after 2020 satisfied Bitquery’s pre‑defined criteria for being Satoshi’s.

Implications

The continued dormancy of Satoshi‑era coins reinforces the narrative that the creator has remained absent from the network since 2011, underscoring Bitcoin’s decentralized ethos.