For years, the technology world obsessed over cryptocurrencies, NFTs, SPACs, and AI startups raising hundreds of millions of dollars before shipping a product. Meanwhile, one of the largest infrastructure markets on the internet matured with almost no public attention.
The global secondary market for IPv4 addresses is now worth an estimated $15 billion. Until recently, there was no public pricing index, no meaningful transaction data, and very little mainstream reporting. Buyers and sellers relied on technical expertise, registry records, and relationships built over decades to value an asset every connected business depends on.
IPv4 addresses became valuable for one simple reason: there won’t ever be more of them. The global pool was exhausted in 2011, forcing every organization that needs additional address space to acquire it from an existing owner. Despite billions of dollars changing hands over the last decade, the market remained largely invisible until Escrow.com recently published one of the first comprehensive public looks at the industry. The companies that recognized this early built an extraordinary advantage.
Amazon Web Services is estimated to have acquired roughly 191 million IPv4 addresses since 2011, an inventory now worth between $7 and $8 billion at current market prices. Those addresses support AWS’s global cloud platform while generating recurring revenue every time customers deploy public IPv4 resources. As cloud environments expand, those addresses become permanently embedded in customer infrastructure rather than returning to the market, steadily reducing the amount of available inventory.
That buying strategy helped drive IPv4 prices above $50 per address before AWS shifted its acquisition strategy after introducing public IPv4 charges in 2023. Prices corrected sharply, leading many analysts to conclude demand had collapsed. The market told a different story. Demand didn’t disappear. It broadened.
Instead of a handful of hyperscalers dominating purchases, buyers now include cloud providers, ISPs, hosting companies, AI platforms, broadband operators, and enterprise networks. They aren’t acquiring IPv4 as a speculative investment. They need it to deploy infrastructure. Finding that infrastructure is often harder than selling it.
Every IPv4 transaction begins by locating address space that already exists but is no longer being fully utilized. Brokers spend years tracing mergers, bankruptcies, university allocations, and decades-old corporate records to recover address blocks that owners frequently don’t realize still have substantial value. Escrow.com CEO Matt Barrie aptly described them as the “Indiana Joneses of the internet.”
When Jake Brander founded Brander Group in 2016, the challenge wasn’t simply finding IPv4 inventory. It was creating a process buyers could trust.
Today, Brander Group facilitates between 50 and 80 IPv4 transfers each month across ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, and LACNIC. The company has worked with more than 3,000 organizations in over 60 countries, is approaching $1 billion in cumulative IPv4 transaction volume, and completed a single transaction valued at approximately $89 million for a multinational cloud provider.
A critical part of that growth has been Brander Group’s partnership with Escrow.com. Secure escrow gave buyers and sellers around the world confidence to complete increasingly complex, high-value IPv4 transactions, helping transform what was once an informal niche into a mature global marketplace.The next phase of the market is already taking shape.
Artificial intelligence, cloud expansion, and federally funded broadband projects are introducing new buyers into an ecosystem where supply can never increase. Companies such as Oracle, BytePlus, Hostinger, Hetzner, Zscaler, and other infrastructure providers continue acquiring IPv4 because public internet connectivity remains essential to their services.
The market is no longer being driven by a few dominant hyperscalers. It’s being supported by thousands of organizations building the next generation of internet infrastructure. That may prove to be the healthiest signal of all.
The companies that viewed IPv4 as strategic infrastructure years ago are now benefiting from decisions made when few people were paying attention. As awareness grows and competition for quality address space intensifies, the market is becoming less of an industry secret and more of a recognized digital asset class.
