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On-chain data shows that the most massive Ethereum whales control most of the supply, with their holdings continuing to grow.
Huge Ethereum whales own more than 57% of all tokens in existence
In new mail On X, on-chain analytics firm Santiment discussed what the supply of ETH held by different segments of the user base has looked like recently.
The relevant indicator here is “Distribution of supplies“, which tracks the percentage of circulating Ethereum supply held by a given wallet group at the moment.
Addresses or investors are divided into these groups based on the number of coins they hold in their balance. For example, the coin set 1 to 10 includes all wallets that hold between 1 and 10 Ethereum.
In the context of the present topic, there are three broad ranges containing multiple lots that are of interest: 0 to 100 coins, 100 to 100,000 coins, and more than 100,000 coins. The first includes small hands in the market, such as individual investors.
These holders don’t have holdings worth much in the grand scheme of things, so individually they don’t hold any significance in the market. In the second group, from 100 to 100,000 coins, the wallets start to get a bit large, but only at the high end of the range.
The scope includes two of the main investor groups in this sector, namely Sharks and whales. Whales are much larger than sharks, so they are the group that carries more importance in the market.
Finally, the largest addresses on the network hold more than 100,000 ETH. At the current price, this amount is close to $400 million, so investors in this group would be very large indeed. Perhaps the appropriate name for them is “Huge whales“.
Now, here’s the chart shared by the analytics company that shows the trend in supply distribution for these three Ethereum wallet ranges 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 chart above, the percentage of Ethereum supply held by mega whales has risen over the past two years. Meanwhile, the two smaller walleye groups have lost their dominance, with sharks and whales in particular seeing fairly sharp declines.
The massive whales, with just 104 members, today hold 57.35% of the ETH supply, a new all-time high. Meanwhile, holdings of sharks and whales reached an all-time low of 33.46%.
In general, centralization of supply is not a positive for any cryptocurrency. However, this is particularly important for Ethereum as the network operates on a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This means that if an entity or group of entities controls 51% of the supply, they can take over the network.
However, many of the mega whales will not be “real” investors but rather wallets belonging to staking pools and other platforms, who just hold the coins in one place on behalf of many investors.
Ethereum price
Ethereum has seen a decline over the past day, as its price now stands at $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
