This year, the IPv4 Transfer Market has proven to become more volatile with each new month, seemingly mimicking trends of the global roller-coaster stock market. Large cloud companies, hosting providers and Internet service providers are continuing to purchase vast amounts of IPv4 address blocks from large enterprises. In turn, this is causing one-off /17 and /16 IPv4 subnets from other suppliers to sit in the market longer than usual, causing prices to stabilize and ultimately decrease. How does this affect the rest of the market?
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The six years leading into 2022 have painted a picture of a continuous bull market in the IPv4 industry. Prices for IPv4 address blocks had an average increase of around 25% every year due to limited availability and increased demand. However, this year has proven that even the IPv4 market can’t always be resilient to economic conditions.
We are finally seeing some good news on the IPv4 demand front. As of September 2022, we have 2 months in a row of positive IPv4 demand trends that parallel previous years, prior to the IPv4 crash in May of 2021. We aren’t out of the woods just yet, however, the indicators could be great for the remainder of the year.
So far, 2022 has shown a stable yet low level of IPv4 demand as compared to the previous three years. This is largely attributed to a massive increase in demand and the shortage of IPv4 inventory back in 2021, which in turn caused the prices to increase by 100% in just 1 year.
As of February 2022, the IPv4 transfer market continues to show a stabilized trend as it relates to demand for IP transfers over the past 9 months. The transfer requests increased from 132 in January to 137 in February, demonstrating an insignificant increase of +4%. While the trend seems to be very consistent, there is still a -30% decrease of IPv4 transfer requests since the IPv4 crash in May of 2021.
In a significant move that promises to reshape the landscape of IP address management, Brander Group has announced a strategic partnership with IPXO. This collaboration aims to address the growing demand for IPv4 addresses by providing innovative and efficient leasing solutions.