• May 9, 2026
The Market for IPv4 Addresses: Who’s Buying, Who’s Selling?

For most internet users, an IP address feels like plumbing: invisible, boring, and always there. For cloud providers, hosting companies, telecom operators, email platforms, VPNs, and fast-growing SaaS businesses, IPv4 addresses have become something else entirely: scarce infrastructure with a real market price. That market exists because IPv4 was built with a hard ceiling. The protocol uses 32-bit addresses, giving the internet roughly 4.3 billion possible IPv4 addresses, many of which are reserved or otherwise unavailable for normal public use. The central global IPv4 free pool was depleted in February 2011, when IANA distributed the last available /8 blocks to the five Regional Internet Registries.