What Is IPv4 Exhaustion — and Why It Still Shapes the Market
The IPv4 pool officially ran dry years ago. Exhaustion is why addresses are scarce, valuable and tightly controlled — and why the transfer market exists.
The number that changed everything
IPv4 was designed in 1981 with room for 4.3 billion addresses — a number that seemed absurdly generous when the internet was a research network. By the 1990s it was already clear it would not last.
The exhaustion timeline
IANA handed out the final /8 blocks in February 2011. The RIRs followed one by one: APNIC in 2011, RIPE in 2012, LACNIC in 2014, ARIN in 2015, and the last AFRINIC space in 2020. Since then, every new address has had to come from someone who already holds it.
What it changed
Exhaustion turned addresses from a utility into an asset. A transfer market emerged under RIR rules, prices climbed to tens of dollars per address, and leasing appeared as a way to earn from dormant space. New networks no longer ask “can we get addresses?” — they ask “from whom, and at what price?”
Why it still matters today
IPv6 was supposed to end the story, but adoption is slow and the internet still runs mostly on IPv4. Every new service, startup and cloud workload adds demand to a fixed pool — which is exactly why dormant blocks, and the data that reveals them, are worth so much.