I manually audited the top 10,000 Ethereum addresses to learn about liquidity, profitability, market manipulation and what Whales are doing with their money.
This is the first of many reports to come from this data set.
Finding #1 — How Much ETH is in the Top 10k Addresses?
The top 10k addresses represent 91.7M ETH.
The top 1k addresses represent 70.7M ETH.
The top 100 addresses represent 37.8M ETH.
The top 10 addresses represent 16.6M ETH.
Roughly 17% ETH is held by 10 addresses.
Some maximalists my scream that this is too high and proves a “premine” and centralized control.
But, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The reason ETH’s distribution seems so focused is actually smart contracts.
Unlike some other currencies, ETH actually gets used for a purpose.
A lot of time that purpose requires depositing something into a contract, often in a trustless manner in which you still control the asset.
A great example is wETH where we deposit Ether in order to get Wrapped Ether for standard ERC20 use.
This smart contract usage is what skews the distribution on ETH, and can make it seem like it isn’t fair.
So what happens if we remove the smart contracts and only look at exchanges, individuals and funds?
Finding #2 — Eth’s Distribution
When we remove the smart contracts the distribution is now:
The top 100 represent 26.4M ETH.
The top 1k represents 42.5M ETH.
The top 10k represents 57.2M ETH. (56.7%)
