How to track retail investors in crypto?

Not sure if this needs its own thread, but here I am. I'm curious if anyone knows how to gauge retail investor activity in the Bitcoin and crypto markets. I've noticed a lot of crypto analysts and news sources saying that retail involvement is way down, but I have no idea how to find the data behind that. Do major exchanges release any detailed trading stats? Or is it smarter to track addresses with small balances as an indicator? If it's the latter, what range should I be looking at (like, addresses with between 0.0001 and 0.01)? Also, is there any free site that shares this kind of info? Not really keen on paying for a Glassnode subscription.

I don't think exchanges would give you those data because of privacy policy. Maybe you can only see how many buyers and sellers on glassnode as your indicator of participation but we do not know how many investors is actually participating. About addresses, it looks like you're talking about monitoring addresses with low balances. Usually those data include dust because of low balances. However, Glassnode seems providing this data under their "Bitcoin Address Cohorts" and "Shrimp Address Count" below 1 BTC, but the problem is Glassnode isn't free to provide that data. It looks like I found something with a chart that counts addresses with low balances below 1 BTC and also above. Check the link below. - https://bgeometrics.com/bitcoin-distribution/ I hope that's the data you looking for. Based on the chart I've noticed on the shrimp bitcoin distribution chart, it shows a stable accumulated started last year until now.

@pawel7777. I reckon this topic deserves its own thread because there are some people in the cryptospace who are expecting an overinflated bubble to begin to form and a bubble pop occurrence when there is no more inflows entering the market heheheh. We are witnessing the beginning of the blowing of a big cryptospace market bubble. This bubble will grow very fast and it might not take years from now. There might only be a few months for the cryptospace  before the big dump. Jim Chanos has seen this movie before — and he says it doesn’t end well. The legendary short seller that called the 2001 Enron bankruptcy is now sounding the alarm on the booming market for corporate Bitcoin treasuries. Chanos is comparing it to the SPAC mania of 2021 that raised $90 billion in just three months before crashing spectacularly. Only this time, it’s public companies issuing convertible notes and preferred shares to buy Bitcoin — and not much else. “We are seeing SPAC-like 2021 numbers in the Bitcoin treasury market right now,” Chanos said on the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast this week, adding that there are reasonably large announcements every day now — “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a night.” Read in full https://www.dlnews.com/articles/markets/short-seller-jim-chanos-warns-btc-treasury-companies/

I think it does deserve its own topic. It's important and valuable to distinguish how smart investors and retail investors are behaving. It might be possible to retrieve/monitor data on transfer sizes (deposits and withdrawals) in labelled exchange wallets to gauge retail activity. Trading data based on size may be inaccurate given small transfers can be done at high frequency by whales, though accuracy could be improved by filtering by total wallet volume and balance size. These are all just ideas and would be valuable data but might require some work to get (especially since there are so many chains to monitor and get data from now). Have you tried glassnode to see what data you can get from there? You'd probably need a paid plan to get meaningful on-chain data, but they're good. If you are more technical, you can do a lot with Dune analytics as well. There is some off-chain data that can give ideas on sentiment (like social media and google trends) though they're just to get an idea of sentiment.

For the past 2 or maybe 3 bitcoin tops, the best indicator was the #1 Coinbase app listing on the Apple app store. It was either #1 overall or #1 in the Finance section. You could see the chart and it basically had a huge jump and Bitcoin topped either the month before or after. IF you search Google for this topic you can see a few people who did research on the trend. It was actually pretty accurate. Can't think of any other method. There are ways where you can see exchanges having backlogs which can hint that retail is joining and they are short of staff to approve the accounts, that was perhaps another indicator. However there is nothing public which can really pin point this data you are looking for.

This kind of data hard to come by, usually paywalled and even I doubt the accuracy of the data. I usually just consider the fear indicator to determine retailer participation, so far I haven't found any such data except maybe data about address owned by institutional vs retailer. https://en.macromicro.me/charts/29402/bitcoin-addresses-with-balance-more-than-or-equal-to-0-1 even then I don't even know if it's reliable.

So I did try to see the charts on the provided URL that you gave and here are the data: And just like you, I have some doubts on the number itself. Specially that there are more retail investors that pushes the market around last year and this year. Although we all know that we have a say in the market, but I didn't expect that we are the one really pouring our money. Maybe one interpretation is that we are now seeing how good Bitcoin is a investment and maybe we also closer to the adoption as once we dreamed of. Although I still believed that institutions and the wealthy people are something also a big investors right now with billions coming in from those groups.

Thanks everyone for your replies. Some really good resources there. Much appreciated. Looks interesting but I'm not sure how to interpret this chart. The URL says "bitcoin-addresses-with-balance-more-than-or-equal-to-0-1" - if this means that only addresses with balances with BTC0.1 or more are considered, I'm guessing a lot of small retail investors would be exluded from the data. And it's showing a ratio between addresses with balances of BTC0.1 - BTC10 to adresses with BTC1,000 or more. So (without going into too much detail) it's possible that it's not always a fair reflection of increase/decrease in retail participation. Still useful though.

Those numbers can never be 100% accurate, but it is also not that important. I get it but that doesn't mean that we are going to get the result we want by looking at these. As long as there is an up, there is an up in both, and when there is a down, there is a down for both. Many people assume, if they can see what the companies are doing versus what the normal people are doing, they can do what the companies are doing and reverse of retail ones, and make money, but that is not the case. Even that chart, which is probably wrong, shows we move together. This is why we need to be careful about our moves and how we base them. If we know what is good for us, we would just buy when there is a crash, and sell when there is a big pump.

look at ebay for gear sales. this miner that I am selling does not work for retail miners https://www.ebay.com/itm/156984520065 if this sells it will not sell to a retail person as power is not cheap enough. When gear like this sky rockets in price and sells out real fast we will then have retail fomo.

Still a good option for someone who rents a flat at a fixed price with electricity bills included   But I don't think today's retail investors would even consider mining. It got too competitive years ago, so there's hardly any discussion about individual mining in the bitcoin sphere. I believe someone, long time ago, pointed out in another thread that a good indicator of retail hitting the peak (and therefore a good indication of an exit point) was the popularity of crypto trading apps (mostly Coinbase) in App Store. Quoting from memory, I think they Coinbase app was the most popular one during the 2017 and 2021 cycles peaks. I'm not sure was it for all apps or for financial category only. This might not work in this cycle as Coinbase is not as popular as it was + other non-crypto financial apps also added crypto investing features. Edit: I just realised adaseb essentially said the same above, I mised his post when typing this.

Do exchanges exchange data like liquidations (short/long) counted here? There's some data from Coinglass about some exchange liquidations, especially real-time data. And also the open-interests data on different exchanges. https://www.coinglass.com/LiquidationData

It is not only the Google trends for searches on these apps, the Google trends on the words bitcoin, crypto, cryptocoin, cryptocurrency and other words that are related and connected to the crypospace appear to have been good for monitoring retail participation in the past. In any case, it appears that the pumps will continue to have much resistance hehehe. These good news from the Donald is not enough to give everyone the pumps similar to 2017 and 2021.

Not 100% related to the topic, but Benjamin Cowen posted an interesting metric of Historical Social Metric Risk: https://x.com/intocryptoverse/status/1946721969262477783 I don't think the metric is accessible for free, though. Anyhow, from the comments I understand it represents retail interest via social media activity (e.g., YouTube views/subs, Twitter mentions). But the big question is whether it's bullish or bearish. Bullish interpretation: it proves that Bitcoin is underhyped and there's still potential for growth. Bearish interpretation: retail is simply not interested in Bitcoin and won't be putting their money in it. I'd add a neutral interpretation to it: everybody already knows what Bitcoin is. It has become mainstream and purchasable even on non-crypto finance apps, therefore people could be investing in it without talking about it as much as they did in the past.

In addition to the above two signs, the sudden increase in the number of new users on trading platforms as well as the spike in trading volume in the market, especially on CEX, is also another sign. Or the unusual growth of lowcap memes or altcoins as newbies are often attracted to low cap coins with the expectation of making quick profits. Or the growth of small wallets and on-chain activity also increases significantly...in general, it needs to be combined with many factors and it will take a lot of time. There are many websites or tools that provide this in-depth market data today, such as glassnode, nansen, messari pro, cryptoQuant or lunarCrush...but most of them are not free.

I think it would be important if we first understand who retailers are and their vision. Retail investors could be those users who buys little amount of Bitcoins probably fractions (Satoshi) and holds for a short term goals. They don't tend to Invest on Bitcoin for a hedge of values like the instituional investors or companies do. Likely, there are also Bitcoin or crypto users who are not investors. They are either not holding against inflation neither to make profits but literally using Bitcoin on their every day transactions payment purposes. They are either not traders too. So looking at this, no exchange can detect who are retailers or whatsoever of investors because they don't know the reason of users owning Bitcoins.

And why there had been much commentators and news deviating from the interest of the retail investment sector is the insight of investors being able to understand that investors can only make fortunate profits on Bitcoin when they holds for a long term and also inspires accumulating strategy. I think the trend will help consoling short term investors not to take control of their emotions that drives Fomos. For exchange that gives statistics of retail investors is what I don't think it's possible.

App store rankings! I've seen some posts about this on reddit, and there is some bot on telegram that tracks it but only for Coinbase. It is such an easy metric. If you can find data on appstore rankings for previous cycles you will see that this is one of the best if not the best indicator by far. Your interpretation is wrong. Almost nobody knows what Bitcoin is or how it works. Most people who are in "crypto" don't know it either.

Yeah, it's already mentioned in the posts above. It's not necessarily what I was asking in the OP, but historically it was a good metric to monitor the market getting overheated and to decide when the peak of the cycle was. But I don't think this metric will work forever. First of all, the old retail investors likely already have crypto apps installed. Second, Coinbase is no longer as much of a hegemon as it used to be. Looking at the data: https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone/finance-apps/6015?chart=top-free we can see that Crypto.com or Kraken are not far behind, meaning the popularity can be more split over a few crypto apps, unlike in the past when it was concentrated in Coinbase. Thirdly, other non-crypto financial apps now also offer crypto investing, so people could just stick to them for convenience. Technically that's true, but let's not pretend the average retail investor actually cares about anything more than buying/selling BTC for fiat.

Good points but I disagree a little bit. I think that most retail investors come and go with the cycle, and that only those that stay in crypto retain these apps. Because of this I expect them to come back by app installation. As far as I know the app store rankings are about app installs, not about app usage? So it works still for both those that have accounts if they deleted the apps and are coming back and those that don't. But yes eventually it will stop working. What I want to say here is that a person who knows what Bitcoin is will absolutely want to acquire it! There is simply no other option. Either you understand Bitcoin and you want it, or you don't understand it and you dismiss and ignore it. When previous bull runs were very hot, sometimes even your taxi man or barber could ask you about Bitcoin. That was a sign of retail participation, even if those retail people knew nothing about Bitcoin. Maybe that can be used as a metric?    From my observations, whoever manages to understand Bitcoin absolutely becomes a Bitcoiner. There is no doubt there!