The collapse in IPv4 transfer prices is what caught my eye here, dropping from a ~$55 peak in 2021 to a mean of $22 in early 2026 (figure 12).
This validates my hypothesis that the run-up in 2020–2022 was an artificial scarcity bubble driven largely by hyperscalers. AWS was right up there stockpiling before they shifted their pricing model. Once AWS introduced the hourly charge for public IPv4 addresses (effectively passing the scarcity cost to the consumer), their acquisition pressure vanished. The text notes Amazon stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025. I think they have moved from aggressive accumulation to inventory management.
We are seeing asset stranding in real-time. The market has realized that between the AWS tax and the efficacy of mobile CGNAT, the desperate thirst for public v4 space was not infinite. I'm curious to hear more takes on this.
The CGNAT point is underrated. Carriers have zero incentive to move away from it - thousands of users per public IP, no transition cost.
The interesting downstream effect is on IP reputation systems. Traditional detection assumed 1 IP = 1 user. CGNAT breaks that entirely - platforms can't aggressively filter mobile carrier IPs without blocking legitimate customers by the thousands.
Makes sense the IPv4 price dropped once mobile networks proved you can serve massive user bases with relatively few public addresses.
As someone with a background in electronics who doesn't manage any internet-connected equipment but has multiple embedded devices connected to a WAN, I'm glad that IPv4 still seems to have a bit of life left in it.
When IPv6 was developed, over 30 years ago, connecting everything to the internet seemed like a great idea. I know that IPv6 can be made secure, but I don't have the background or research time to learn how to do so, and the NAT-by-default of IPv4 effectively means that I get the benefit of a default-deny security strategy that makes it impossible to accidentally directly connect anything to the internet.
I'm hoping I can keep using IPv4 until IPv8 or IPv4.5 or whatever comes next is developed with the modern proliferation of cheap insecure IoT in mind.
For some background on why IoT products are so insecure:
Hardware manufacturers don't really comprehend the idea of updates, let alone timely of security patches. Hardware has to work on the day of release, so everything is documented and tested to verify it will work. I have hardware with a TCP/IP stack that was released 20 years, (https://docs.wiznet.io/Product/Chip/Ethernet/W5500) and doesn't have a single errata published, despite widespread use. This is expected for every single component, for even the smallest 1-cent transistor, which has dozens of guaranteed performance characteristics laid out over several pages of documentation (https://en.mot-mos.com/vancheerfile/files/pdf/MOT2302B2.pdf).
When manufacturers venture into a product that runs software, they don't realize that for a given complexity, working through undocumented or, worse yet, incorrectly documented APIs takes more time than the equivalent hardware development and documentation. I've worked on multiple projects where software bugs were fixed with hardware workarounds, because it's faster, cheaper, and easier to develop, test, document, retool, and add a few cents of bill-of-materials cost per product, than to get reliable output from the already-written library that's supposed to provide the functionality.
The hardware TCP/IP stack that I linked to was developed at a time when it was the cheapest way to connect a low-power embedded system to a network. Modern low-power embedded systems have multiple cores running at hundreds to thousands of MIPS making the resources to run a softtware TCP/IP stack trivial, but the product still sells well, because when security is an absolute must, the hardware development and maintenance cost for the functionality is still cheaper than through software, even when there's no marginal cost to run the software.
"As you may know, IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure."
Their move disgusted me and I moved from AWS to OCI.
"As the Internet continues to evolve, it is no longer the technically innovative challenger pitted against venerable incumbents in the forms of the traditional industries of telephony, print newspapers, television entertainment and social interaction. The Internet is now the established norm. The days when the Internet was touted as a poster child of disruption in a deregulated space are long since over, and these days we appear to be increasingly looking further afield for a regulatory and governance framework that can challenge the increasing complacency of the very small number of massive digital incumbents.
It is unclear how successful we will be in this search for responses to this oppressive level of centrality in many aspects of the digital environment. We can but wait and see."
If you think the time that a given social network spends at the top is long now, wait until there's a "regulatory and governance framework" knocking out most newcomers.
The real story here is China and India have been quietly buying up gobs of African IP blocks - most of which are used for botting operations. I see it in my server logs.
China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.
When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.
I see this often that people refer to countries as actors. Are you implying that the government of these countries bought those resources and they're now owned by the government? Or are you saying that citizens/corporations of those countries are buying? I find it weird, I wouldn't use the phrase "The United States is buying XYZ" unless it was the current government doing so?
I pay close attention to IPv4 addresses for outgoing emails. At work we use several email services and pay for a dedicated IP(v4) at each. And when we provision a new service, we expect our new IP address to be “clean,” by which I mean it is ideally not found on any email reputation list.
For websites and services I don’t care. Some hosting platforms publish via CNAME, and some via A and AAAA records. Most seem to use a mix of v4 and v6 addressing.
The falling price of IPv4 addresses looks to me like we’ve made it to other side of the IPv6 rollout: demand for IPv4 is falling faster than supply now. Not clear if those prices are adjusted for inflation; the post-COVID spike looks like a lot of other nominal price graphs. If not, then the recent price drop is even more dramatic than it appears.
Perhaps in the long run, IPv4 becomes an artisanal choice for uses that depend on stable IP reputation: email sending, primarily. And everyone else relies on TLS for reputation signals, not caring about the IP address.
There is a growing grey market for IPv4 still, though, and probably always will be. It seemed like people were treating them like crypto for a while. Still people out there trying to re-route old abandoned ranges. There are still a lot of legacy ranges that belong to defunct organizations and never got properly sold.
It's more likely that the widespread deployment of CGNAT and 464XLAT in mobile networks made the IPv4 scarcity a non-issue. The some CGNAT solutions can multiplex more than 20000 devices onto a single IPv4 address.
I'm a very early adopter of IPv6, and I _still_ have operational issues with it.
Just yesterday--and I don't know how I wound up there--I looked at RFC1166 (from 1990) which is "a status report on the network numbers and autonomous system numbers used in the Internet community." There's a long list of companies and individuals who were assigned "internet numbers". To my surprise, my real name is listed there! I have no clue why.
Not to spoil the article (but there's a lot in there) but I was particularly intrigued by the ongoing tumbling of the price of IPs. After peaking in 2022, "these days the low price of $9 per address is back to the same price that was seen in 2014."
I was also surprised to find that out the other day when someone on Reddit was complaining they couldn’t get a good price on a /17 they were hoarding to sell for a profit. Good riddance.
There is no shortage. Go look at IPXO, you can sublease any block size. The RiR's should be reclaiming these unused addresses, but instead the ASN is allowed to sit on them or rent them out, regardless they're not being used. The shortage is caused by hoarding and RiR's not doing their job.
During the holidays I refactored my home network. It was a fun project and I'm still kind of tinkering with it. At one point I decided that now let's go all in on IPv6 and it works now. Only thing that I couldn't do was route traffic from internet to my end devices, because I understood my ISP and the provided modem. I'm yet to pressure them, maybe they can do it manually for me.. But I'm glad I did it and getting 10/10 in https://test-ipv6.com/ is satisfying. At least this home traffic contributes to migration..
I'm thinking about going full on IPv6 now with NAT64, but that a stretch already, because it needs upgrading a gear.
Fwiw (in case it hadn't occurred to you already), there's no technical requirement to run your NAT64 on your router/modem/CPE. You could run the NAT64 on a Raspberry Pi or some other little device for instance.
There are plenty of vectors left to squeeze the existing IPv4 space especially all the Legacy assignments held by deceased companies and individuals. There is no procedure to reclaim them. Even when you invest time and money to find the relatives, the RIR may decline a transfer so nobody invests here as long as plenty of former hosting, colocation and regional access providers leave the market after their customers moved to the US hyperscalers or out or business.
I think around 2000 every new LIR at RIPE got a /19 allocation. Smaller companies are now almost 30 years old and the founders divest their assets step by step unless someone buys everything.
I'm interested in any new successful startups going full IPV6 from the beginning. Once we cross that bridge, where your internal IPV4 knowledge is equivalent to token ring knowledge, there's nothing else to watch.
Relatedly: wouldn't there be many applications for which ipv4 isn't needed?
For example, Walmart has electronic eink shelf tags they can update remotely. Each one needs a unique address. I wouldn't think it needs ipv4. It doesn't have to connect to the SpaceJam website.
I would think that as time goes by, the number of these new devices would swamp the number of old ones that need ipv4. v4 would still be around and might even seem important to the fogies using web browsers on laptops...meanwhile the street lamp has five ipv6 addresses and no ipv4 ones.
While I don't think a couple administration's website archives are enough to drive adoption, one could imagine there might be some government resources that might.
Sadly browsers don't seem to warn users that they couldn't connect because of the lack of IPv6 (and doing so would be difficult for IPv6-only DNS servers), so it just looks like a regular connection failure.
One interesting development is the Matter standard for controlling smart home devices is v6 only. Every lightbulb, switch, sensor etc gets a v6 address and can be individually communicated to without having a manufacturers hub translating in the middle.
Exclusively IPv6 without any transitional mechanisms would be difficult to succeed with.
However, there are network upstarts like Jio (India) which made huge v6 investments from day one which use 464xlat for subscribers to access v4-only resources.
That looks weird. I am guessing that someone knows about the mismatch between ccTLDs (where the UK is .uk) and ISO codes (where the UK is GB and Ukraine is UA) and tried to correct something and got it wrong.
What happens when a so-called "tech" company that cannot be trusted wants to punch holes in the user's firewall without prior consent from the user
Purely hypothetical, of course
For example, WhatsApp tries to connect to at least two servers on UDP port 3478 without asking the user if this is what they want to do or explaining the purposes of these connections
Example server addresses are
57.144.221.54
31.13.70.48
3478 is the port used for "Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
Through Network Address Translators (NATs)", or "STUN" for short
Really need governments to start pushing harder on IPv6 adoption. We need sticks, not just carrots. My favorite is chaos engineering forced IPv4 downtime.
In 2021 I speculated on IP and acquired a /23 block by ARIN wait list. I figured on running some services from the IP space for a while and after the 5 years mandated wait time would cash in when surely it would fetch $100k from some party desperate for IPv4.
At this point the services I am running are far more lucrative than the IP space itself is turning out to be.
I am on zen which you can consider to be as vertical tab mode in FF as well (considering zen is based on FF) (but all be it, I love how slick zen looks! Zen is amazing)
And I have the same texture too! I hadn't observed it until your message
It always sends me to sleep when IP enthusiasts lament the lack of adoption for IPv6.
It's obvious to anyone that looks at the two formats that any kind of hacky workaround like NAT gateways will be preferable indefinitely to actually adopting the monstrosity that is IPv6.
The real hacky workaround that we have adopted is just centralizing the whole internet in like 5 giant companies and making everyone else into passive consumers who can't even make a voice call to each other without giving some form of payment to a cloud giant.
[+] [-] Fiveplus|1 month ago|reply
This validates my hypothesis that the run-up in 2020–2022 was an artificial scarcity bubble driven largely by hyperscalers. AWS was right up there stockpiling before they shifted their pricing model. Once AWS introduced the hourly charge for public IPv4 addresses (effectively passing the scarcity cost to the consumer), their acquisition pressure vanished. The text notes Amazon stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025. I think they have moved from aggressive accumulation to inventory management.
We are seeing asset stranding in real-time. The market has realized that between the AWS tax and the efficacy of mobile CGNAT, the desperate thirst for public v4 space was not infinite. I'm curious to hear more takes on this.
[+] [-] JulianHart|1 month ago|reply
The interesting downstream effect is on IP reputation systems. Traditional detection assumed 1 IP = 1 user. CGNAT breaks that entirely - platforms can't aggressively filter mobile carrier IPs without blocking legitimate customers by the thousands.
Makes sense the IPv4 price dropped once mobile networks proved you can serve massive user bases with relatively few public addresses.
[+] [-] zokier|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] WorldMaker|1 month ago|reply
At driving the majority of mobile traffic to IPv6? Otherwise, it seems hard to describe mobile CGNAT as efficacious to me.
[+] [-] inemesitaffia|1 month ago|reply
Aka Kuiper
>stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025
[+] [-] dlcarrier|1 month ago|reply
When IPv6 was developed, over 30 years ago, connecting everything to the internet seemed like a great idea. I know that IPv6 can be made secure, but I don't have the background or research time to learn how to do so, and the NAT-by-default of IPv4 effectively means that I get the benefit of a default-deny security strategy that makes it impossible to accidentally directly connect anything to the internet.
I'm hoping I can keep using IPv4 until IPv8 or IPv4.5 or whatever comes next is developed with the modern proliferation of cheap insecure IoT in mind.
For some background on why IoT products are so insecure:
Hardware manufacturers don't really comprehend the idea of updates, let alone timely of security patches. Hardware has to work on the day of release, so everything is documented and tested to verify it will work. I have hardware with a TCP/IP stack that was released 20 years, (https://docs.wiznet.io/Product/Chip/Ethernet/W5500) and doesn't have a single errata published, despite widespread use. This is expected for every single component, for even the smallest 1-cent transistor, which has dozens of guaranteed performance characteristics laid out over several pages of documentation (https://en.mot-mos.com/vancheerfile/files/pdf/MOT2302B2.pdf).
When manufacturers venture into a product that runs software, they don't realize that for a given complexity, working through undocumented or, worse yet, incorrectly documented APIs takes more time than the equivalent hardware development and documentation. I've worked on multiple projects where software bugs were fixed with hardware workarounds, because it's faster, cheaper, and easier to develop, test, document, retool, and add a few cents of bill-of-materials cost per product, than to get reliable output from the already-written library that's supposed to provide the functionality.
The hardware TCP/IP stack that I linked to was developed at a time when it was the cheapest way to connect a low-power embedded system to a network. Modern low-power embedded systems have multiple cores running at hundreds to thousands of MIPS making the resources to run a softtware TCP/IP stack trivial, but the product still sells well, because when security is an absolute must, the hardware development and maintenance cost for the functionality is still cheaper than through software, even when there's no marginal cost to run the software.
[+] [-] TNorthover|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] newsoftheday|1 month ago|reply
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...
"As you may know, IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure."
Their move disgusted me and I moved from AWS to OCI.
[+] [-] blakesterz|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbadfeline|1 month ago|reply
Don't bring technology to a political fight, the hoarders've got more tech than you, "wait and see" is what a bag of sand does at the gun range.
[+] [-] dlcarrier|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] tokyobreakfast|1 month ago|reply
China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.
When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.
[+] [-] rendx|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|1 month ago|reply
For websites and services I don’t care. Some hosting platforms publish via CNAME, and some via A and AAAA records. Most seem to use a mix of v4 and v6 addressing.
The falling price of IPv4 addresses looks to me like we’ve made it to other side of the IPv6 rollout: demand for IPv4 is falling faster than supply now. Not clear if those prices are adjusted for inflation; the post-COVID spike looks like a lot of other nominal price graphs. If not, then the recent price drop is even more dramatic than it appears.
Perhaps in the long run, IPv4 becomes an artisanal choice for uses that depend on stable IP reputation: email sending, primarily. And everyone else relies on TLS for reputation signals, not caring about the IP address.
[+] [-] hnuser123456|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberax|1 month ago|reply
Hm...
It's more likely that the widespread deployment of CGNAT and 464XLAT in mobile networks made the IPv4 scarcity a non-issue. The some CGNAT solutions can multiplex more than 20000 devices onto a single IPv4 address.
I'm a very early adopter of IPv6, and I _still_ have operational issues with it.
[+] [-] SchemaLoad|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] assimpleaspossi|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] petercooper|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Bluecobra|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bastardoperator|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ilvez|1 month ago|reply
I'm thinking about going full on IPv6 now with NAT64, but that a stretch already, because it needs upgrading a gear.
[+] [-] jcgl|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] rmoriz|1 month ago|reply
I think around 2000 every new LIR at RIPE got a /19 allocation. Smaller companies are now almost 30 years old and the founders divest their assets step by step unless someone buys everything.
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] awestroke|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] massysett|1 month ago|reply
For example, Walmart has electronic eink shelf tags they can update remotely. Each one needs a unique address. I wouldn't think it needs ipv4. It doesn't have to connect to the SpaceJam website.
I would think that as time goes by, the number of these new devices would swamp the number of old ones that need ipv4. v4 would still be around and might even seem important to the fogies using web browsers on laptops...meanwhile the street lamp has five ipv6 addresses and no ipv4 ones.
[+] [-] Aloisius|1 month ago|reply
While I don't think a couple administration's website archives are enough to drive adoption, one could imagine there might be some government resources that might.
Sadly browsers don't seem to warn users that they couldn't connect because of the lack of IPv6 (and doing so would be difficult for IPv6-only DNS servers), so it just looks like a regular connection failure.
[+] [-] SchemaLoad|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] speedgoose|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] oasisbob|1 month ago|reply
However, there are network upstarts like Jio (India) which made huge v6 investments from day one which use 464xlat for subscribers to access v4-only resources.
[+] [-] kincl|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] graemep|1 month ago|reply
its correct in other tables.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|1 month ago|reply
Purely hypothetical, of course
For example, WhatsApp tries to connect to at least two servers on UDP port 3478 without asking the user if this is what they want to do or explaining the purposes of these connections
Example server addresses are
57.144.221.54
31.13.70.48
3478 is the port used for "Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Through Network Address Translators (NATs)", or "STUN" for short
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3489.txt
Perhaps IPv6 would obviate the need for STUN
[+] [-] alexinavar|1 month ago|reply
[0]: `<meta content="initial-scale=1,width=device-width" name="viewport">`
[+] [-] Ericson2314|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] psim1|1 month ago|reply
At this point the services I am running are far more lucrative than the IP space itself is turning out to be.
[+] [-] neoromantique|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ramon156|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Imustaskforhelp|1 month ago|reply
And I have the same texture too! I hadn't observed it until your message
[+] [-] billyjobob|1 month ago|reply
1. My AppleTV began stuttering during playback.
2. My old iMac began crashing every time it connected to the wifi.
At least the iMac has an option to disable IPv6. The AppleTV has no such option so I had to do it in the router.
[+] [-] jakey_bakey|1 month ago|reply
It's obvious to anyone that looks at the two formats that any kind of hacky workaround like NAT gateways will be preferable indefinitely to actually adopting the monstrosity that is IPv6.
[+] [-] shmerl|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|1 month ago|reply