As the world enters 2026, the global pool of IPv4 addresses—once thought finite—continues to support a growing Internet, albeit with creative patchwork. In his latest report, Geoff Huston examines how the exhaustion of IPv4 has been mitigated not by mass IPv6 adoption, as once hoped, but through increasingly dense reuse and trading of existing addresses.

NAT workaround: Despite predictions made decades ago that IPv4’s 4.3 billion addresses would be insufficient, clever engineering has prolonged its lifespan. Network Address Translation (NAT) has allowed billions of devices to share limited public IPs, effectively delaying the urgency for IPv6 deployment. However, Huston warns that this workaround may not scale forever, raising the spectre of a fragmented network if global interoperability breaks down.

Market shifts: In 2025, the number of allocated IPv4 addresses actually declined slightly—by just 0.01%—to 3.687 billion. Meanwhile, the IPv4 transfer market remains active, though recent price drops suggest dwindling demand. The average price per IPv4 address fell to $22 in late 2025, with lows hitting $9, reversing the sharp inflation seen between 2015 and 2021.

Reuse dominance: Most address transfers now involve blocks first allocated over a decade ago. Newer allocations are rare, and only APNIC and AFRINIC retain modest pools of unallocated addresses. Reuse and redistribution, not new supply, now dominate the market.

While IPv6 adoption remains slow, commercial and operational pressures may eventually push networks to shift. Yet Huston’s outlook is cautious: “My personal opinion lies in a future of highly fragmented networks,” he writes, suggesting the age of a universally connected Internet may be waning.

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