On-chain data shows that the largest Ethereum whales control the majority of the supply, with their holdings continuing to grow.
Ethereum Mega Whales Own Over 57% Of All Tokens In Existence
In a new post on X, on-chain analytics company Santiment discussed how the supply of ETH held by different segments of the user base has looked recently.
The index of relevance here is “Asset Distribution,” which keeps track of the percentage of Ethereum circulating that a given group of wallets currently owns.
Addresses or investors are classified into these groups based on the number of coins they hold on their balance. For example, the group of 1 to 10 coins includes all wallets that hold between 1 and 10 ETH.
In the context of the current article, three broad ranges that contain most collections are of interest: 0 to 100 coins, 100 to 100,000 coins, and 100,000+ coins. The first includes the small hands of the market, such as retail investors.
These managers don’t have that many holdings in the grand scheme of things, so individually they don’t have much value in the market. In the second group, 100 to 100,000 coins, the purses start to get bigger, but at the end of the range.
The list includes two key investor groups in the industry, sharks and whales. Whales are much larger than sharks, so they are a group that carries more value in the market.
Finally, the largest addresses in the network hold more than 100,000 ETH. At the current price, this amount is close to $400 million, so the investors in this group will be really big. A more appropriate name for them would probably be “mega whales.”
Now, here’s a chart shared by a analytics company that shows the trend in Asset Distribution of these three Ethereum wallet categories over the past decade:
The value of the metric appears to have been on the rise for the mega whales in recent months | Source: Santiment on X
As shown in the graph above, the percentage of Ethereum supply owned by mega whales has increased over the past few years. At the same time, both small wallet categories have lost dominance, sharks and whales in particular seeing a significant decline.
The mega whales, consisting of only 104 members, today own 57.35% of the ETH supply, a new all-time high. Meanwhile, the catch of sharks and whales is at a very low level of 33.46%.
In general, centralization is not good for any cryptocurrency. However, it is very important for Ethereum as the network works in consensus based on Proof-of-Stake (PoS). This means that if a business or group of businesses controls 51% of the supply, it can take over the network.
That said, many mega whales may not be ‘real’ investors but wallets for staking pools and other platforms, who simply hold coins in one place on behalf of many investors.
Trading currency of ETH
Ethereum has seen a reversal during the past day, as its price is now $3,930.
Looks like the price of the coin has overall been moving sideways recently | Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView
Featured image from Dall-E, Santiment.net, chart from TradingView.com
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