376 "whales" control more than a third of the ETH in circulation
Key facts:
According to Chainalysis, most of these addresses do not mobilize their ETH towards crypto exchanges.
The richest addresses of Bitcoin concentrate between 20% and 16% of the wealth of the network.
According to research carried out by Chainalysis, more than 30% of the ethers (ETH) currently circulating are in the hands of individual players with large holdings of the cryptocurrency, better known as whales.
Only 376 Ethereum addresses concentrate this important amount of wealth, although its economic effects are not as marked as it is thought, indicates the company specialized in data analysis and blockchain information. We are talking about more than 31 million ETH, which is equivalent to USD 8.1 billion , based on current market figures .
In fact, according to the company's report, published this May 15, although it is a third of the current circulating total, the whales only represent "a small percentage" of the economic transactions of the network, that is, the activity The economics of these directions is not significant enough to manipulate the price of the cryptocurrency.
While they constantly control a large portion of the circulating supply of Ether, these whales paradoxically only account for a small percentage of the economic transaction activity of Ether. Whales consistently own between 25% and 40% of the circulating supply of ether, but only represent between 5% and 18% of the volume of economic transactions. This is because most whales (~ 60%) either keep their assets or do not regularly trade with exchanges.
Chainanalysis
These whales concentrated 47% of the total circulating in 2016, which shows that some decentralization of this wealth has occurred in the last 3 years. Furthermore, according to the company, of the top 500 ETH owners currently, 124 addresses are associated with exchange services and platforms.
The Chainalysis research also served to confirm some theories about the behavior of ETH. Thus, according to the report, the funds sent by the whales do not impact the price directly, but they do affect volatility. "On average, a whale sending $ 1 million in ETH two days ago leads to a 0.1 unit increase in interday volatility today," the document reads.
And Bitcoin?
According to Chainalysis, Bitcoin has a lower percentage of wealth concentration, since the richest addresses of this network concentrate 20% of the total circulating . According to the data from the website called Are We Decentralized Ye t? , the figure is even lower, with 16% wealth among the top 100 addresses on the web. It should be noted that this figure does include services and exchange houses, so the percentage could be even lower.
In addition, the Chainalysis report indicates that the behavior of the ETH price is conditioned by the fluctuation of BTC prices , although the company revealed not to have found "a statistically significant impact" of BTC prices on the inter-day volatility of ETH.