IPv4 Demand Stability Leading to Increased Activity

Like any healthy and predictable market cycle, IPv4 demand continues to remain steady.   This consistency further promotes the notion of a stable market since there was no serious fluctuation in either direction.  As expected, our demand has been increasing slowly while supply of mid-sized IPv4 assets is beginning to run low.  The question then becomes if the current IPv4 supply (including projected incoming supply) will be enough to support the increased demand requirements for 2024

The average requests for IPv4 addresses in 2023 was 141transfers per month.  Starting in January of 2024, the IPv4 requests are up to 151 requests per month, demonstrating a +7% increase over 2023.  Even better, last month saw an increased demand of +12% over the 134 average requests in 2022.  While these numbers may not seem significant in the grand scheme, it is important to notice the consistency in the market stability over the previous 12 months.  This is usually an indicator of a bull market.

With that said, the overall demand is still down -7% as compared to the average 163 average transfers from 2019 – 2021.  Those were the years where the market experienced the highest increases in IPv4 prices every quarter.  As with any typical market, future demand will be determined by the amount of IPv4 availability and supply this year.

As for Brander Group’s inventory, we are seeing much less availability of /20s – /16s IP blocks. In comparison to last year, we had around five times the inventory in every block size category versus today. We are interested to see how the market continues to unfold through Q1.

We encourage anyone who is relies on government funding or will be affected by it to follow our BEAD Progress Dashboard.  We provide monthly updates on which states are getting funds allocations, which should provide a roadmap for fund distributions.