On-chain data shows that the largest ethereum whales control the majority of the supply and their holdings continue to grow.
ethereum mega whales own more than 57% of all existing tokens
in a new <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/santimentfeed/status/1868814689657893362″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>mail On x, on-chain analytics company Santiment has analyzed how the supply of eth held by different segments of the user base has been viewed recently.
The relevant indicator here is “Supply Distribution”, which tracks the percentage of ethereum's circulating supply that a given wallet pool holds at the moment.
Addresses or investors are divided into these cohorts based on the number of coins they have in their balance. For example, the 1 to 10 coins group includes all wallets holding between 1 and 10 eth.
In the context of the current topic, three broad ranges containing multiple cohorts 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 holders don't have holdings that add up to much in the grand scheme of things, so individually they don't have any importance in the market. In the second cohort, the 100 to 100,000 coin cohort, the wallets start to get a little large, but only towards the end of the range.
The range includes two of the sector's key investor groups, sharks and whales. Whales are significantly more massive than sharks, making them the most important cohort in the market.
Finally, the largest addresses on the network have more than 100,000 eth. At the current price, this amount is close to $400 million, so investors in this group would be quite large. An appropriate name for them would perhaps be “mega whales.”
Now, here is the chart shared by the analytics firm showing the trend in supply distribution for these three ranges of ethereum wallets over the last decade:
<img decoding="async" class="alignnone aligncenter" src="https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Just-104-Ethereum-Whales-Control-57-of-Supply-Data-Reveals.jpeg" alt="ethereum Mega Whales” width=”3138″ height=”1750″/>
The value of the metric appears to have been on the rise for the mega whales in recent months | Source: <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/santimentfeed/status/1868814689657893362/photo/1" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Santiment on x
As shown in the chart above, the percentage of ethereum supply held by mega whales has increased in recent years. At the same time, both smaller portfolios have lost dominance, with sharks and whales in particular witnessing a fairly steep decline.
The mega whales, consisting of only 104 members, today hold 57.35% of the eth supply, a new all-time high. Meanwhile, shark and whale holdings are at an all-time low of 33.46%.
Generally, centralization of supply is not positive for any cryptocurrency. Still, it is especially important for ethereum, as the network operates on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based consensus mechanism. This means that if an entity or group of entities controls 51% of the supply, they can take over the network.
That said, many mega whales would not be “real” investors, but rather wallets belonging to staking pools and other platforms, which simply hold coins in one place on behalf of many investors.
eth price
ethereum has seen a pullback over the past day as its price is now $3,930.
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Looks like the price of the coin has overall been moving sideways recently | Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView
Dall-E Featured Image, Santiment.net, TradingView.com Chart
