While that was inevitable at ARIN’s inception and continued for many years, it is not currently the case that there are more legacy customers than paying customers – as ARIN has more than 24000 paying registry customers (as increase of more than 500 from
a year prior), and only 15233 non-contracted legacy customers. Even if one doesn’t count the 8000 or so paying customers who just have an ASN number, the contracted IPv4/IPv6 customers exceed the number of non-contracted legacy customers - and the non-contracted
legacy customers continue to drop in number by hundreds each year while the contracted customers continue to grow.
Note - the same effect is seen with IPv4 address space in the ARIN registry - as of December 2021, total uncontracted legacy IP resources now represent only 35.65% of total IP inventory and legacy resources in registry steadily declining over time – 638M
in Dec 2020 to 596M today (-6.6% year over year drop.) While some of these blocks do transfer to other regions, the vast majority (result of NRPM 8./3 transfer) remain in the ARIN region receiving registry services under standard RSA.