IPv4 Market Summary and 2023 Price Predictions

2022 demonstrated that even the most business-critical products and marketplaces can experience pricing volatility. Rare IPv4 commodities certainly possess all the key traits of a resilient market. However, under extreme circumstances, even IP’s can fluctuate and fall subject to pricing resistance. Let’s discuss the leading factor that contributed to the fluctuations this year.

COVID caused prices to rapidly increase in 2020 and 2021. During the pandemic, many organizations that would have re-addressed and sold IPv4 had to refocus efforts on COVID contingency plans. At the same time, most ISPs, Cloud Operators and Hosting companies had an influx of client demand due to the quickly shifting work-from-home culture. These organizations were forced to over-purchase IPv4 addresses due to fear of future shortage, large client usage projections and rising IPv4 prices. The lack of supply combined with an increase in demand caused IPv4 prices to spike more than 100% in 2021.

In 2022, there was a pendulum swing in IPv4 supply once most organizations had control over COVID-related projects. They reallocated efforts to focus on IPv4 re-addressing projects to take advantage of the inflated IPv4 prices. During this same time at the beginning of 2022, we began to see a consistent decrease in IPv4 buyer demand. These 2 events combined caused market stabilization and ultimately price resistance at around -15% of all-time highs.

Year	Average Transfer Requests	Transfer Requests Change (Y/Y)	Average Price Per IP	Price Changes (Y/Y)
2019	166	0%	$20	+18%
2020	167	+.05%	$24	+20%
2021	156	-7%	$38	+58%
2022	134	-17%	$48	+26%

In December 2022, there were 121 IPv4 transfer requests. Compared to the Q4 average of 127, the market had a decrease of around -5%. Compared to the 2022 yearly average of 134 requests per month, December was down around –9%. Most notably, compared to the 163 average IPv4 transfer requests from 2019 – 2021, there was a significant decrease of -18%.

According to traditional market fundamentals, we could only expect IPv4 sales prices to begin to increase again if the demand for IPv4 transfer requests is consistently over 160 per month. However, we also know that the IPv4 market has a quickly diminishing supply of unused IPv4 addresses.

Therefore, even with this new lower standard of demand over the last year, we will likely once again see IPv4 prices increase. Our team will closely monitor the market supply to prepare our clients for the inevitable price spikes to come in 2023.

Brander Groups Impact on the Global IPv4 Market

In 2022, Brander Group completed 470 IPv4 transfers globally for a total of 4,469,761 IP Addresses with a sales revenue of $227,057,682 (USD). While our total number of IPv4 transfers decreased by -26%, in 2022 our sale revenue grew by an incredible +125% year over year.

We work with leading brands and support over 2000 global clients who require IPv4 addresses in ARIN, RIPE, APNIC and LACNIC regions. Our services offerings include network connectivity, cloud deployments, data center, network security and more.

This year, we have also become even more focused on IP Strategy with the addition of RIPE LIR services, leasing of large IPv4 subnets, and assisting with Carrier Grade NAT, and IPv6 options.