Unlocking the Hidden Value of IPv4 Addresses
The services behind IPv4 value, Lu Heng’s Capacity Europe argument, and why usable resources need portable records and continuity.
A customer can reach a cloud service because many things work together: software, servers, cables, routing and an address that identifies where traffic should go. The address is easy to overlook. Yet a change to its registration or routing can interrupt a business that has invested far more than the price of the address.
This is the starting point for Lu Heng’s argument about IPv4 value: look at what the resource enables, who has built a business around it, and who can affect its continued use.
The question raised at Capacity Europe
At Capacity Europe in London in 2024, Lu Heng argued that telecoms and cloud companies were overlooking the economic importance of their IPv4 holdings. He called for executives to take an active interest in the policies and institutions around those resources, rather than leaving the subject entirely to technical teams.
The contemporary BTW.Media account of the speech reported his argument that a major revaluation could reach 300 times the existing value, or $60 trillion collectively. Those figures express the scale of the opportunity he was arguing for in 2024; they are not a measurement of today’s market or an assured return. The Capacity Europe recording provides the original public appearance.
Value starts with a working service
Consider an address used by a customer-facing service. Over time, it can become part of DNS records, partner allowlists, monitoring, routing and reputation systems. Replacing it may involve customers and other organisations as well as the operator’s own engineers.
That dependence helps explain why the resource deserves executive attention. Its significance is not exhausted by its purchase price. A board should also understand what relies on it, who can alter the surrounding records, and what keeping the service running would require if an arrangement failed.
It also explains why unused addresses and addresses embedded in a live service are different operating situations. A holder considering a lease needs to know what is genuinely available, who will use it, and who will handle routing, reputation and the eventual return. Putting a resource to work takes ongoing management.
A finite address space is not the whole scarcity story
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, as defined in the protocol specification. Some ranges have special purposes; the entire numerical space is not a pool of interchangeable public addresses available for sale.
There is another distinction: a registry’s pool for new allocations and the addresses already held and used by networks are not the same thing. An exhausted allocation pool does not by itself establish whether an operator can obtain usable space through a lease or transfer.
In Note 45, published in March 2026, Lu Heng challenges the move from administrative exhaustion to a claim that scarcity must constrain the Internet. He asks readers to examine actual operating costs and availability. That later argument is a useful way to test scarcity claims, rather than treating the word “finite” as a complete economic explanation.
Who keeps the record, and who controls the business?
A Regional Internet Registry maintains information about number resources. Operators build and run the networks that use them. Lu Heng’s criticism is that the first role can expand into discretionary power over the second.
From his perspective, an administrator’s task of maintaining unique records does not establish a political mandate over the people and businesses behind those records. If control over recognition becomes control over continued operation, a valuable business can depend on decisions made by an institution it cannot readily replace.
The proposed direction is practical: verifiable rights, portable records, replaceable administrators and continuity for running networks. These are the conditions Lu Heng develops in Note 72. Recognising capital value and limiting administrative power belong to the same argument.
What a company can examine now
Start with an inventory of the prefixes you use or hold. Identify the services attached to them, the relevant registration and routing responsibilities, and any space that is genuinely unused. Then trace who can act if the commercial or registry relationship changes.
The urgency comes from accumulating dependence: an address becomes harder to change as more customers, configurations and partner systems rely on it. Understanding those relationships while everything works gives an operator more room to act.
For the next step in the argument, read Note 66 on why an IPv4 transaction must be judged by continuity after the handover. It connects asset value to the responsibility of keeping the resource usable.