While Bitshares has 138,000 accounts with BTS, only about 33,000 have been active in the last month. Bitshares is a decentralized open block chain crypto-currency exchange. As a result, one is able to view the holdings of every account and one can look at the balance of every account. 

Great, let’s take a look at the BitShares Data and get a good basic understanding of what is going on the in the blockchain. 

First off there are 138,000 BTS accounts. 

I downloaded this data and did some analysis in excel. 

![Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 4.33.57 PM.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmWNycY5LzDpYSYDcRuzfs6Q3QDRuxPWJpiji3WUZWzDBB/Screen%20Shot%202018-07-05%20at%204.33.57%20PM.png)

So if we divide the users into 10 groups based on balance we get 10 groups of accounts each with 13,885 accounts. Ranking these accounts by value, the richest 1/10 of the accounts have 99.5% of all the money. 

Yes, you read that the top 10% of the accounts have almost all the money.

Hint: Most of these are dead accounts.

Ok so how many of the accounts have had a change in BTS balance from June 1 to June 28?

33,000.
![Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 4.52.22 PM.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUsynaf4LkPqktKMoS7Bx9EBxjRxFqf2WQ6QVeugypRZK/Screen%20Shot%202018-07-05%20at%204.52.22%20PM.png)

So of the 138K account only 33,000 accounts have had a change in BTS activity.

One can assume that those accounts traded in the last month, and all other accounts have not.
 
(See since BTS is the default way to pay trading fees, if an account has not had any change in BTS there is a good chance that account has not traded. While it is true that trading fees can be paid, in other coins, we are simplifying the analysis for our purposes.)

How many accounts trade on any given day? 
That is around 10K to 12K.

How many of these accounts are bots?

Some. Most of the active ones are. 

So Lets take a look at a little of the raw data…. 

Who are the richest accounts?


![Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 5.05.45 PM.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQV57CjizB5nWCV79GTjDJwqbvP4J8xB7KzRizChDgyCL/Screen%20Shot%202018-07-05%20at%205.05.45%20PM.png)
Note: This only includes accounts on the decentralized exchanges not BTS on other exchanges.




So how about a few random looks alphabetically… 


![Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 5.08.23 PM.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUB6u7YRcuVsPCtK89D82tHxPzBfujXjq39aeFM2L4XaE/Screen%20Shot%202018-07-05%20at%205.08.23%20PM.png)

![Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 5.07.53 PM.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbxwkzocQXP1chipsSkmwnf6BePvXJZ6R8WLMViedtKuR/Screen%20Shot%202018-07-05%20at%205.07.53%20PM.png)

![Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 5.08.53 PM.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaAShH5U7V2FDYDvAtAXp5JugqX1V4G5bK7u225FTUuZs/Screen%20Shot%202018-07-05%20at%205.08.53%20PM.png)

![Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 5.09.45 PM.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmS7AwTqCunZWendwzJFcw642233ym2qW4e1fP7w5w4sUt/Screen%20Shot%202018-07-05%20at%205.09.45%20PM.png)
If you are having trouble coming up with account names… you can go for more z’s.


Some of the account names are 63 characters long. 


![Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 5.13.53 PM.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYTRNC8y2Jp2gFF7GE3FkZCqwqT6mfSc6uVrgmMoPJuiA/Screen%20Shot%202018-07-05%20at%205.13.53%20PM.png)
And they can be a little interesting…




Ok so that seems mildly interesting and a little pointless. 

So how many people are really “on the exchange”

Well there are 15,500 accounts with more than 1,000 BTS

There are 27,400 accounts with more than 100BTS

There are 94,000 accounts with less than 5 BTS.

So there are between 20,000 to 40,000 real accounts on Bitshares. There is another 100,000 accounts that were likely used in the past or are currently inactive. 

Now this is only including accounts that held BitShares. If you don’t have BTS in your account you are not “real” in my book. I have heard reports, of account numbers in the 1 million range. That is to say there is a large number of accounts that do not hold BTS, but have been registered. I have seen evidence to indicate those numbers are true but do not have a conclusive way to easily confirm that.

The number of people that are active on a platform can be an important number to know. This frequently gets misquoted. I wanted to set the number straight. You are welcome to check my numbers. There are other ways to slice and dice these numbers, but ultimately, BitShares has a certain number of active users. There is nothing wrong with people coming here to change coins and leaving. There is no way to “close” an account. I do think there is some highly suspicious mass account creation going on. I don’t know the purpose of it though, so I am just saying… it is there. Go research it yourself. 

There are several block explorers that can help in your analysis...
https://www.cryptofresh.com/
https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/explorer/blocks
http://bts.ai/?locale=en
http://open-explorer.io/#/dashboard

That said, diving into the data can be useful and interesting.

Have fun browsing the blockchain.