On-chain data shows that the largest Ethereum whales control the majority of the supply, with their holdings only increasing.
Ethereum mega whale owns over 57% of all tokens in existence
in a new Post On X, on-chain analytics firm Santiment discussed what the ETH supply held by different segments of the user base has been looking like recently.
The indicator of relevance here is “Supply Distribution,” which keeps track of the percentage of Ethereum circulating supply that a given wallet group currently owns.
Addresses or investors are divided into these groups based on the number of coins they hold. For example, the 1 to 10 coins group includes all wallets with between 1 and 10 ETH.
In the context of the present topic, three broad categories with several groups are of interest: 0 to 100 coins, 100 to 100,000 coins, and 100,000+ coins. The first includes small players in the market, such as retail investors.
These holders don’t have that much of a stake in the grand scheme of things, so they individually don’t matter to the market. In the second group, those with 100 to 100,000 coins, wallets start getting a little larger, but only towards the end of the range.
This category includes the two leading investor groups in the sector, Sharks and Whales. Whales are much larger than sharks, so they hold greater value in the market.
Finally, the largest addresses on the network hold over 100,000 ETH. At the current price, this amount is closer to $400 million, so investors in this group will be quite sizable indeed. An appropriate name for them would probably be “Mega Whale”.
Now, here is the chart shared by the analytics firm that shows the trends in supply distribution for 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 held by mega whales has increased over the years. Additionally, both small wallet categories have lost dominance, with sharks and whales in particular seeing steep declines.
Mega whales with just 104 members hold 57.35% of the ETH supply today, a new all-time high. Meanwhile, the share of sharks and whales is at an all-time low of 33.46%.
In general, centralization of supply is not positive for any cryptocurrency. Still, this matters especially for Ethereum because the network runs on a consensus mechanism based on Proof-of-Stake (PoS). This means that if any entity or group of entities controls 51% of the supply, they can take over the network.
As stated, many mega whales will not be ‘real’ investors, but rather wallets belonging to staking pools and other platforms that simply hold coins in one place on behalf of multiple investors.
eth price
Ethereum has seen a decline in the past few days, as its price is now at $3,930.
Looks like the price of the coin has overall been moving sideways recently | Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView
Dall-E, featured image from Santiment.net, chart from tradingview.com
