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The IPv4 transfer market

The pool of free IPv4 addresses ran dry years ago — the RIRs handed out the last large blocks between 2011 and 2019. Since then, address space changes hands through a secondary market: organisations that hold more than they use sell to those that need more. Every transfer is logged by the Regional Internet Registries, and those logs are what you see here. (IPv6, with its vast supply, has almost no such market; mergers and reorganisations are excluded from the flows below.)

IPv4 transferred

1.5B

1,486,098,784 addresses, all years

Transfer events

96,848

logged IPv4 transfers

Peak year

2018

290.4M addresses moved

Volume transferred per year

Addresses (or /48 blocks, or ASNs) that changed hands each year. Switch resource type with the tabs; the tooltip shows the number of distinct transfer events.

Who sells to whom

Top 40 country-to-country IPv4 flows (transfers only; self-transfers and mergers excluded). Read it left → right: the SELLER is on the left, the BUYER on the right, and each band is coloured by the seller. Hover a band for the addresses moved.

◀ Sellers (source)flow = addresses sold →Buyers (recipient) ▶

Net buyers vs net sellers

Inbound minus outbound IPv4 addresses per country — the biggest movers. Green countries are net importers of address space; red are net exporters.

Net buyers

Country	In	Out	Net
US United States	344.7M	307.2M	+37.5M
SG Singapore	24.7M	3.8M	+20.8M
CN China	21.3M	14.6M	+6.7M
HK Hong Kong SAR China	6.3M	2.9M	+3.5M
IN India	6.4M	3.7M	+2.7M
Japan

Net sellers

Country	In	Out	Net
ZZ Unknown	5.5M	28.2M	−22.7M
AU Australia	2.7M	17.7M	−15M
CA Canada	4.7M	18.8M	−14.1M
IE Ireland	37.1K	581.9K	−544.8K
GB United Kingdom	3.5M	4M	−497.2K
ES Spain	325.6K	619.8K	−294.1K
NZ New Zealand	545K	786.9K	−241.9K