BTC UTXO Count: 166.51M
How many separate pieces of bitcoin are sitting unspent on the blockchain. Bitcoin has no account balances — it keeps individual chunks of coin, like the separate coins and notes in a wallet, and this counts them.
Bitcoin **does not** store balances. It stores individual unspent chunks of coin, each one left over from an earlier payment, the way your pocket holds separate coins and notes rather than one number.
This is the total count of those unspent chunks (the technical name is UTXOs).
Rising means more chunks are being created than spent — more payments, more withdrawals from exchanges, more people splitting funds up. For example, if it goes from 180 million to 200 million chunks over a year, the ledger got about 11% more crowded, which makes running a Bitcoin computer slightly heavier.
It measures clutter and activity, not how many people own bitcoin.
Taken as blockchain.info publishes it: a count of every unspent chunk on the chain on that date. One value per calendar day.
It counts every chunk, including near-worthless leftovers worth a few cents (nicknamed 'dust'), so it grows faster than the number of real users. One wallet can hold hundreds of chunks and one person can own many wallets.
blockchain.info public charts API (utxo-count), pulled by our hourly ingest and stored in our own database. One value per day — that is how the source publishes it.
blockchain.info charts API · full history 2009+