The future of IPv4 markets

Despite IPv6 expansion, scarcity keeps IPv4 valuable, sustaining a global secondary market where addresses increasingly function as tradable digital assets.

• Finite IPv4 supply has created a mature secondary market where address blocks are bought, sold and leased worldwide.
• Prices fluctuate, but persistent demand from cloud, hosting and AI infrastructure suggests IPv4 markets will remain active for years.

What happened

The rise of a digital commodity

The global market for IPv4 addresses is entering a new phase. Once treated as a technical resource distributed freely by internet registries, IPv4 addresses are now traded, leased and managed as scarce digital assets.

The shift is a consequence of a simple structural fact: the IPv4 protocol only supports roughly 4.3 billion unique addresses, and the global free pool has effectively been exhausted. As demand for internet connectivity expanded—from smartphones and cloud computing to IoT devices—the available supply dwindled.

Today, companies that require additional addresses often obtain them through transfers or secondary marketplaces rather than direct allocation from registries. The result is a global market in which address blocks can be valued, traded and even used as financial instruments.

According to industry data, IPv4 addresses have evolved from negligible infrastructure components into a recognised commodity. Analysts note that organisations can now generate significant returns from previously unused address allocations, with blocks sometimes worth millions of dollars depending on size and reputation.

The emergence of brokers and marketplaces—including services such as those provided by Larus and similar trading platforms—illustrates how the internet’s addressing system has become entwined with modern digital economics.

How IPv4 became a tradable asset

The concept of an IP address market would have seemed improbable in the early internet. For decades, organisations received large blocks of addresses from regional internet registries (RIRs) with little cost and minimal oversight.

However, the exhaustion of the IPv4 pool changed that dynamic.

Once new allocations were no longer available, demand began shifting toward transfers between organisations. Companies that possessed unused address blocks—often universities, early internet service providers or legacy technology firms—suddenly held assets that other organisations needed to operate and expand.

Industry reports show how dramatically values have changed. In 2014, IPv4 addresses traded for roughly $15 per address on average. Within five years prices doubled to around $30, and by 2021–2022 some transactions exceeded $45–$60 per address.

As one brokerage executive explained in an industry analysis, IPv4 addresses have effectively become “a commodity” in the digital infrastructure economy.

This transformation has reshaped how organisations manage their network resources. Instead of being treated as technical identifiers alone, IPv4 allocations now appear on balance sheets as assets that can be monetised.

The structure of the IPv4 market

The modern IPv4 ecosystem consists of several interlocking elements:

Regional Internet Registries (RIRs)
Organisations such as ARIN, RIPE NCC and APNIC regulate address allocation and oversee transfers within their regions.

Brokers and marketplaces
Specialist intermediaries facilitate transactions, helping buyers find available blocks and ensuring compliance with registry policies.

Secondary buyers
Cloud providers, hosting companies, telecom operators and data platforms are the primary purchasers of IPv4 resources.

The transfer process itself resembles a regulated asset transaction. Buyers must justify their need for addresses and comply with registry requirements, while brokers often provide escrow services and verification to minimise fraud risks.

In parallel, a leasing market has emerged. Rather than selling addresses outright, organisations can rent unused IPv4 blocks to generate recurring revenue streams.

Demand drivers behind the IPv4 market

Although IPv6—the successor protocol with vastly larger address capacity—has existed for decades, IPv4 demand remains persistent.

Several structural factors explain why.

Cloud infrastructure expansion  

Large-scale cloud platforms and hosting providers still rely heavily on IPv4 compatibility to serve the majority of global internet traffic.

Because many networks operate in dual-stack environments—supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously—additional IPv4 capacity is often necessary even as IPv6 adoption grows.

Legacy systems  

Millions of devices, applications and network services continue to rely on IPv4 compatibility. Replacing or upgrading these systems can be expensive and time-consuming, delaying the transition to IPv6-only infrastructure.

Internet growth  

The number of connected devices worldwide continues to increase. Even with technologies such as Network Address Translation (NAT), providers still require public IPv4 addresses for certain services and applications.

For cloud providers and ISPs, the scarcity of IPv4 addresses has therefore become a direct cost factor. Organisations planning new infrastructure deployments must often budget specifically for IP resources.

Price volatility and market cycles

Despite long-term scarcity, the IPv4 market has recently experienced price volatility.

Industry reports from 2024 and 2025 indicate that the average price per address declined in some segments, particularly for larger address blocks. In some cases, large blocks fell from more than $50 per address to around $20.

However, the decline does not necessarily signal weakening demand.

Transaction volumes have increased as more organisations participate in the secondary market, suggesting that IPv4 trading has matured into a stable asset class rather than a speculative bubble.

In other words, the market may be shifting from rapid price growth toward a more predictable cycle shaped by supply, demand and registry policies.

-IPv4 is the Internet’s most important service enabler; a device or server cannot be online without it.

– Heng.Lu, CEO of LARUS Limited and founder of the LARUS Foundation

IPv4 leasing and financialisation

Another trend reshaping the market is IPv4 leasing.

Instead of permanently transferring address blocks, organisations increasingly lease them for defined periods. Leasing allows address holders to generate recurring income while retaining ownership of their resources.

Research into leasing platforms suggests that monthly leasing prices can average around $0.47–$0.53 per address depending on the marketplace and block size.

For enterprises with large historical allocations, this creates a new revenue stream. For buyers, leasing provides flexibility when scaling infrastructure quickly without committing to permanent purchases.

As a result, IPv4 resources are gradually being treated similarly to digital real estate: assets that can be rented, traded or leveraged depending on operational needs.

The role of brokers and marketplaces

The complexity of IPv4 transfers has led to the rise of specialised intermediaries.

Brokers perform several critical functions:

• locating available address blocks
• verifying ownership and reputation of addresses
• ensuring compliance with RIR transfer policies
• managing escrow and legal documentation

Without such intermediaries, the risk of fraud, compliance violations or purchasing compromised address blocks would be significantly higher.

Marketplaces also improve transparency by reporting transaction volumes and price trends, allowing organisations to evaluate when to buy or lease addresses.

Platforms such as Larus operate within this ecosystem, connecting buyers and sellers in an increasingly competitive market.

Will IPv6 eventually replace the IPv4 market?

IPv6 adoption is steadily increasing, and the protocol’s enormous address space theoretically removes the scarcity problem entirely.

Yet the IPv4 market is unlikely to disappear quickly.

Many networks will operate in dual-stack configurations for years, and full migration to IPv6-only environments remains complex. As long as IPv4 compatibility is required for global connectivity, demand for address space will persist.

Industry analysts therefore expect IPv4 markets to remain active throughout the transition period, even as IPv6 adoption accelerates.

The market may ultimately shrink as IPv6 becomes dominant, but the timeline could extend well into the next decade.

Structural implications for the internet

The emergence of a global IPv4 trading market reveals deeper structural tensions within internet governance.

On one hand, the secondary market provides flexibility and efficiency, enabling organisations to obtain address resources when needed.

On the other hand, it introduces economic inequality into a system originally designed as a shared technical resource.

Early internet adopters that received large allocations decades ago now hold valuable digital assets, while newer companies must purchase or lease address space in competitive markets.

This shift highlights how infrastructure decisions made in the early internet era continue to shape today’s digital economy.

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