Governance
IPv4: The digital real estate of the 21st century
IPv4 addresses have become scarce digital assets with rising market value due to limited supply, slow IPv6 adoption and secondary trading.
Headline
IPv4 addresses have become scarce digital assets with rising market value due to limited supply, slow IPv6 adoption and secondary trading.
Context
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses are 32-bit numerical identifiers that enable devices to communicate over the internet. The finite nature of IPv4 — limited to about 4.3 billion unique addresses — has meant that free pools of addresses have been exhausted since the early 2010s, and allocations by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) now occur only through transfers and secondary markets. This scarcity has had profound effects on how organisations value and trade IPv4 resources. Markets have emerged where IPv4 blocks are bought, sold and leased much like physical real estate in a growing city: demand persists even as supply tightens. Prices per IP address in recent years have tended to range from approximately $30 to more than $50, depending on block size and regional conditions, reflecting strong competition for limited space.
Evidence
Pending intelligence enrichment.
Analysis
One significant factor is slow adoption of IPv6, a successor protocol designed to provide a vastly larger address space. Although IPv6 use has grown over time, interoperability challenges and legacy system dependencies mean that many networks still require IPv4 addresses, maintaining demand. A case study in the secondary market highlights how these trends translate into economic value. Major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services hold extensive IPv4 estates. For example, based on market rates of around $35 per address, AWS’s allocation of over 128 million IPv4 addresses has been estimated in the billions of dollars, turning what was once a technical necessity into a significant asset for large technology companies. Meanwhile, 2025 market data shows that larger IPv4 blocks — once commanding high premiums — have seen price stabilisation or decline as supply fluctuations occur, partly due to organisations returning unused space or selling large blocks on the open market. This has led to volatility in valuations, analogous to shifts in real estate when new developments reduce scarcity pressures. Also Read: Breaking the centralised choke point: Why IP addresses must be decentralised Also Read: Who holds the Internet’s address book? Why digital sovereignty may be a mirage
Key Points
- IPv4 addresses have become a scarce digital resource with active markets where prices are driven by supply and demand dynamics akin to property markets
- Differences in regional policies, slow IPv6 adoption and case studies of enterprise holdings show both opportunities and challenges in treating IPv4 as an asset
Actions
Pending intelligence enrichment.
