India ranks first among 25 countries with 68 million Bitcoin owners at a 4.6% ownership rate in a table posted by analyst Willy Woo on September 1. The same table places India 12th of 25 by ownership rate, below Vietnam at 17% and the United States at 14%.
What the table shows for India
Below India, the table lists the United States at 50 million owners, China at 33 million at a 2.3% rate, Indonesia at 22 million, and Brazil at 21 million, against a world line of approximately 4.5–6% and 370–500 million owners.
India’s position at the top of the headcount column comes alongside one of the lower rates in the table. At 4.6%, India ranks 12th of the 25 countries listed by ownership rate, below Vietnam at 17%, the United Arab Emirates at 16%, Argentina at 15%, the United States, Turkey, and the Philippines at 14% each, and Iran at 13%. Woo did not state a source for the table in the post.
Headcount and rate measure different things
The gap between India’s first place by owners and 12th place by rate is a function of population size. A 4.6% rate applied to a population of roughly 1.4 billion produces a larger absolute number than a 17% rate applied to Vietnam’s population of roughly 100 million.
Chainalysis addresses the same distinction directly in its 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. India ranked first in that index, followed by the United States, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Brazil—but the firm notes that adjusting the data purely for population size moves Eastern European countries, including Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, to the top instead.
The India figure against other estimates
Chainalysis ranked India first for a third consecutive year in the edition released on September 2, 2025, with the country finishing first across all four sub-indices the index measures: retail centralized service value received, overall centralized service value, DeFi value received, and institutional service value. India received roughly $338 billion in crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025, part of an Asia-Pacific total that grew from $1.4 trillion to $2.36 trillion.
Other published India estimates run higher than Woo’s 4.6%. The Crypto Times has previously reported country-level holder counts, placing India at approximately 93.58 million people, or 6.55% of the population. Third-party compilations have cited roughly 119 million Indian owners at an 8.2% rate.
Those figures are not directly comparable to Woo’s. The higher counts measure cryptocurrency ownership overall, while Woo’s table is labelled Bitcoin ownership specifically. The Woocharts methodology Woo cites elsewhere applies a 35% reduction to broad crypto user figures to isolate Bitcoin-only users, on the basis of Binance research indicating 65% of crypto users hold Bitcoin.
Where the underlying curve comes from
Woo directed readers to woocharts.com for his sources. That page states the curve is an interpolation line run through datapoints from four separate sources: Glassnode clustering of on-chain addresses into entities for 2008 to 2016, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance exchange-user counts for 2016 to 2020 with a 13.6% uplift added for users without exchange accounts, and Crypto.com market sizing figures for 2021 to 2023 with the 35% Bitcoin-only reduction applied.
For 2024 onwards, the page states the figures are projected from the last known annual growth rate. The page also notes that from 2016 onwards, users began adopting custodial wallets offered by exchanges, leaving no on-chain footprint—the reason address-based counts and survey-based counts measure different populations.
The global comparison Woo drew
The table followed an earlier post in which Woo listed roughly 5% of the world as Bitcoin owners against approximately 4.5% for gold and 4% for the S&P 500 and asked where adoption would top out. In a follow-up, he said the S&P 500 and gold function as investments while Bitcoin is also used where capital controls or high inflation exist.
Woo did not cite sources for the gold or S&P 500 figures, and no equivalent global ownership survey for either was identified. The World Gold Council measures gold on a different basis, estimating that roughly $9 trillion of bullion held by individual and institutional investors accounts for 3% of an estimated $320 trillion in global financial assets—a share of assets rather than a share of people.
For Bitcoin specifically, Crypto.com’s market sizing put global owners at 365 million. River’s own 2026 adoption report does not publish a global holder count but states that Bitcoin’s average daily price swings in 2025 approached those of gold and the S&P 500 and puts Bitcoin at 1.2% of global money. River separately published a chart on August 23, 2026, stating that 21 million more Americans own Bitcoin than gold; reported figures from that research put US ownership at 49.6 million adults, or 18.6%, against 28.8 million, or 10.8%, for gold — a headcount close to the 50 million in Woo’s table, at a materially different rate, because one is calculated against adults and the other against total population.
India’s position in Bitcoin supply terms has been reported separately from holder counts, and country-level comparisons of the US position have used different methodologies again.
