32 findings after analyzing the top 10,000 Ethereum addresses
Editor's Note: This article comes fromBlue Fox Notes (ID: lanhubiji), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Blue Fox Notes (ID: lanhubiji)
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Foreword: Among the top 10,000 addresses in Ethereum, the balance of the 10,000th wallet also reached 748.16 ETH, and the wallet of the exchange ranked first, reaching more than 3.48 million ETH, accounting for less than 3.2% of the total amount of Ethereum. The asset distribution of Ethereum is highly decentralized. So, what secrets can be unearthed among these top 10,000 addresses? The author of this article is Adam Cochran, who showed us the behavior patterns behind these whale addresses, which is very interesting. This article was translated by "SIEN" of Blue Fox Notes.
I researched the top 10,000 Ethereum addresses to understand their liquidity, profitability, market operations, and what whales are doing with their money.
secondary title
Finding 1: How much ETH is in the top 10,000 addresses
The top 10,000 addresses own 91.7 million ETH
Top 1000 addresses own 70.7 million ETH
Top 100 addresses own 37.8 million ETH
About 17% of all ETH is held by 10 addresses. Some "maximalists" will say that this ratio is too high, which shows "pre-mining" and centralized control. (Blue Fox Note: The "maximalist" mentioned here refers to the die-hard fans in the encryption community who only support Bitcoin)
However, this is far from the truth. The reason is that the main thing that makes the distribution of ETH seem so centralized is actually smart contracts. Unlike other tokens, ETH is actually used for something.
In order to achieve this, it takes a long time for people to deposit assets into smart contracts, and this is usually done in a trustless way, which means that users still control their assets.
wETH is a good example where we store ETH for the purpose of getting Wrapped ETH for standard ERC20. (Blue Fox Note: wETH is a packaged ETH. Since ETH is a native token on Ethereum, it does not meet the ERC20 standard. After packaging ETH, it becomes ERC20-compliant. After that, it can be used in decentralized The platform conducts direct transactions with other tokens) The use of smart contracts makes the distribution of ETH appear "distorted", making it look unfair. What if we remove smart contracts and just focus on exchanges, individuals and funds?
secondary title
Finding 2: Distribution of ETH
When the smart contract is removed, the distribution is now:
The top 100 addresses hold 26.4 million ETH
The top 1000 addresses hold 42.5 million ETH
Top 10,000 addresses own 57.2 million ETH (56.7%)
"Maximists" like to say that ETH is more centralized than BTC, and that its ICO is "70% pre-mined". But what happens when we directly compare the distributions of BTC and ETH?
The top 10,000 BTC addresses own 10.54 million BTC (57.44%)
The top 10,000 ETH addresses hold 57.2 million ETH (56.7%)
XRP 16 addresses hold 55.2% of XRP
LTC 300 addresses hold 54.3% of LTC
Tron 1031 addresses hold 51.1% of TRX
This means that Ethereum and Bitcoin are on the same level in terms of issuing equity. And no other token has achieved distribution levels of this magnitude. (Blue Fox Notes: This does not seem to be completely correct, and students who are familiar with other tokens are welcome to correct them)
secondary title
Discovery 3: How much ETH is there?
Like most people, you might be thinking, 110,696,890 ETH in total. From this point on you start making mistakes.
Most on-chain automated calculations only consider how much ETH has been generated. They cannot calculate how much ETH has been lost or inaccessible. Such work can only be done manually.
We confirm that at least 6.2 million ETH is confirmed to be burned or lost, and another 3.8 million ETH may also be lost or burned. This means that about 9% of ETH is no longer available, and there are only about 100 million ETH in circulation.
This might not sound like much of a difference, but it becomes "really" important when we talk about ETH2.0 sharding benefits. The good team at ETHHub provided us with a nice chart to see the benefits of staking based on the amount of ETH verification.
It drops to the GIC rate when it reaches 100 million staked. This cannot happen as this would result in extremely illiquid ETH. We know about 65 million ETH is "active". We can remove 26 million ETH from exchange hot wallets and assume another 20% of ETH is active in contracts and payments.
This brings the ETH volume down to 76.2 million.
We can also remove 6.1 million burned ETH, 3.8 million possibly lost ETH, and 1.7 million locked ETH. But what about cold wallets? The exchange has a powerful cold wallet storage, and most exchanges do not use partial reserves.
However, these may change under ETH 2.0 due to rewards for staking tokens.
Let us assume that some major exchanges will maintain full reserves, and some relatively minor exchanges will not maintain full reserves. We assume that 80% of the cold wallet funds remain in the cold wallet. This means we can withdraw 20 million ETH again.
This leaves 44.6 million ETH, which can be used to enter staking funds in the future. But this is the absolute maximum amount.
So, how do we estimate how much ETH will be staked? We take the distribution of ETH as a basis, and generally technically, we use a model of the distribution, which fits a little bit to the standard distribution. It comes from a theory that bridges the chasm.
Basically, it means we want to embrace new technologies.
2.5% of innovators
13.5% of early adopters
34% early majority
These waves ultimately depend on the maturity of the product.
It is difficult to calculate how much of the 44.6 million ETH will enter each stage. Because the ratio across the chasm is not based on ETH balances. It is based on the number of holders - which is not a standard distribution. However, a rough estimate can be made.
2.5% will be 1.15 million ETH
13.5% will be 6 million ETH (total 7.15 million ETH)
34% will be 15.1 million ETH (total 22.3 million ETH)
Therefore, we can estimate:
It will drop to 6%-8% once staking services are more powerful and commonSeven Reasons ETH 2.0 Will Create an Economic Shift》）
Once ETH2.0 is launched and can be traded, it will stabilize at around 4-6%.
These early gains do not account for the burning of EIP-1559, or the increase in the price of ETH. As we know, the launch of ETH 2.0 will result in some major price moves. (You can refer to the article "
Therefore, I guess the following conclusions can be drawn:
secondary title
Finding 4: The staking income at the beginning of ETH2.0 may be 12%-17%+
That's it. (Blue Fox Notes: From the perspective of Blue Fox Notes, the author underestimated the enthusiasm of the participants, especially the enthusiasm of large fund holders.)
secondary title
Finding 5: ETH is extremely active.
14.02% are stored in cold wallets (idle for more than 1 year)
what does that mean?
1.76% are locked in timelock contracts
This may not seem shocking at first glance, but it can be compared to the statistics of all other Ethereum addresses. Among them, 54.39% of the addresses are inactive (more than 1 year), 39.93% of the addresses are idle, and only 5.68% of the addresses are active.
what does that mean?
This marks our fourth discovery.
Finding 6: Whales are active and growing
That means whale accounts are very active in this down market, and a lot of them are accumulating. Existing whales have increased their positions by over 4% over the past 6 months. ($550 million)
That rivals the roughly $600 million in new money that flowed into bitcoin last year. However, for Ethereum, this has only happened to whale accounts, and only in the past 6 months. Whales love ETH and BTC. No other coin has this level of inflow.
But perhaps more importantly:
Discovery 7: The influx of new whales
There are a large number of new wallet addresses in the top 10,000, and they have their first transactions on fiat deposit exchanges that serve a large number of users (mostly in Gemini, Kranken, and Coinbase).
These new addresses typically buy between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of ETH, and they account for roughly 6% of the top 10,000 addresses. Or, in the past 6 months they have generated approximately $100 million in new funds to buy ETH.
secondary title
Finding 8: Exchanges are used as wallets
However, there are some winners and losers:
secondary title
BitFlyer, Gate.io, Coinbase, and Kraken have the largest ratio of hot and cold wallet storage. The highest reaches 78% cold wallet storage. They do not risk their users' cryptocurrency.
secondary title
On the other hand, Yobit, Poloniex, and Bithumb rely too much on hot wallets. The highest reached 91%.
secondary title
Discovery 11: Poloniex cold wallet ratio changes
When Circle purchased Poloniex, they moved their assets to better cold wallet storage with strong reserves. Later, Poloniex was taken over by TRON, and it seems that the proportion of cold wallets has decreased, and it is only a partial reserve.
Finding 12: Most ETH is not being sold
Currently, there are only 19.5 million ETH to be sold on exchanges. Even if there are 33.6 million ETH stored in the exchange, only 58% are in the selling state. Therefore, whales are buying, not selling.
For comparison, when the price of ETH has risen by more than 25%, historically this figure has exceeded 75%. And this is the first time in history that ETH rose by more than 50%, while the sell-off ratio was less than 80%.
The whales are hungry.
Discovery 13: Unclaimed wealth
Among the top 10,000, 347 genesis addresses never claimed the ETH purchased by ICO. The abandoned funds consisted of 1.7 million ETH, worth roughly $340 million.
There may be other unclaimed long tail Genesis wallet addresses. However, if these funds are used for staking, it can generate more than $5 million in annual income.
Perhaps the Ethereum community is worth discussing forking these unclaimed funds on ETH2.0, and then mortgage them, and use these proceeds to fund community projects.
secondary title
When it comes to Genesis wallets, most ETH Genesis members still hold the majority of their funds. On average, developers and founders still hold 56.4% of ETH in their genesis wallets.
Only two of the founding members of the top-ranked addresses sold ETH in large quantities. In both cases, the sale was to fund crypto operations struggling with revenue.
Additionally, at least two of the founding team members never spent their genesis gift ETH.
What about Vitalik?
secondary title
Discovery 15: V God has true love for Ethereum
35,Vitalik may have around 630,000 ETH at its peak.
Of this at least 54,856 ETH was personally donated by him to outside entities.
He sold 167,000 ETH before 2018.
He invested another 50,000ETH in EthDev.
This means that V God has only sold 26% of its ETH holdings in the past 5 years, most of which were sold when ETH prices were low.
On the other hand, he donated at least 21% of his ETH to support the ecosystem, and he continued to hold the rest. This breaks the narrative that Ethereum is a scam by its founders.
Vitalik holds a maximum of 0.9% of ETH. For every ETH he sells, he also donates roughly the same amount to the ecosystem.
secondary title
Discovery 16: Patience of genesis address holders
These people are also ETH purists, 97.4% of whom have never bought any other token.
secondary title
In the genesis address & top 250 personal accounts, other tokens we see are mainly ANT, BAT, ENG, ENJ, GNO, GNT, HOT, KNC, LINK, MKR, MLN, OMG, POWR, QSP, RDN , REN, REP, TKN, ZRX. In all cases, these tokens are held by only 1-2 addresses.
secondary title
Finding 18: Average Holding Balances
The average balance held by the top 10,000 wallet addresses is 9,170 ETH (about $1.8 million). In part, this is due to the bias introduced by the exchange. The median is 1672 ETH (approximately $334,000).
secondary title
16.2 million ETH is in "active" circulation, meaning it has passed through payment processors, payment gateways, or smart contracts (excluding exchanges or multisigs) in the past 90 days.
This means that ETH is actually being used "a lot" as currency and gas fees. This compares to Bitcoin, which has 57% of Bitcoins that have not moved in over a year (21% that have not moved since 2015).
Over the past two years, only 0.36% of bitcoins have passed through payment processors. When it comes to currencies, ETH is 440 times more used in transactions than Bitcoin.
ETH is money. Straightforward, simple and repostable.
secondary title
Discovery 20: Miners hoard
Oddly enough, miners started hoarding. Over the past 6 months, miners have accumulated 1.15 million ETH, worth roughly $230 million, which they have never sold.
We have never seen such a rapid increase in the demand for miners to hoard ETH. It appears that ETH miners are preparing to convert their mining operations to staking operations as the launch of Phase 0 approaches.
This will reduce the cost of miners. However, some miners continue to sell heavily, which may indicate that they will not become stakers in the future. Only about 20% of the miners seem to be accumulating, but they are accumulating aggressively.
This could mean that about 80% of miners will switch to other PoW chains. This could be good news for ETH's sibling, ETC.
It also means that if we can make it easy for users to host their own nodes on low-end hardware, then we have an opportunity to further improve decentralization. Either way, miners are bullish on the future of ETH.
secondary title
Finding 21: ETH storage on exchanges has exploded
Over the past 6 months, daily ETH deposits on exchanges have grown 5x, climbing from 11,000 per day to over 55,000 per day.
Instead, these sell walls are digested by the whales. Despite a 5x increase in deposits, the price of ETH has increased instead.
This means that big investors have confidence in ETH.
In the past three times, we can see that when the exchange deposits ETH increases by 4-5 times within a month, it will cause the market price to drop by more than 40%.
This is the only time so far that the opposite has happened. Currently, there is a predominantly positive sentiment displayed in the market.
secondary title
Discovery 21: Some people control the market
At least a dozen whales, working with some exchanges, appear to be manipulating the market.
Their attacks are as follows:
First, we are seeing an increase in the number of people shorting ETH. Usually it starts with BitFinex, then expands to BitMex, and finally expands to other exchanges.
Then, all of a sudden, the market sold off heavily. They profit from their huge shorts and then buy them back at a lower price.
Once complete, they return transactions to their addresses in batches.
It sometimes takes them over two weeks to migrate their ETH back. They go back with profits. Typically these wallets spend 4-6 weeks buying new ETH after they dump.https://web.archive.org/What's really interesting is that BitFinex cold wallets seem to participate in this sell off quite often (about 40% of the time), which is surprising given how rarely cold wallets move.
secondary titlehttps://www.trustnodes.com/)
Discovery 23: BitFinex used user funds to vote on ProgPoW
) Only about 3 million ETH participated in the voting process, which means that BitFinex represented more than 40% of the votes. And, it’s not the only voting operation around ProgPoW.
The blame swirls around NVIDA and AMD, and GPU data centers help fund ProgPoW. (
Not surprisingly, we identified 36 other cold wallet addresses that voted for ProgPoW and then went idle again. This confirmed what most people suspected.
secondary title
Discovery 24: Coinbase's Stealth
The exchange that best conceals transactions is actually Coinbase. They added new wallets and mixed funds in all outbound transactions, making it difficult to identify.
We were able to easily discern the source and destination of 80% of trades from all other exchanges. Only Coinbase (and Tornado.cash) make it hard to recognize.
secondary title
We can also see wallets associated with big players such as JPMorgan Chase, Reddit, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Walmart.
100% of these wallets are accumulating ETH.
It's unclear what its purpose is, where it fits in the corporate structure, or whether it's an official company plan.
But clearly, at this price point, their accumulation is growing and somehow betting on ETH.
Discovery 26: Wealth = Patience
Those whales who have seen their net worth increase the most over the past three years have been the ones who have been patient.
They always rarely sell their ETH.
They also never bought tokens on ICO, they always waited a few months after the token was listed until its price dropped.
secondary title
Discovery 27: Who is the biggest hater of ETH?
There has been a lot of talk against ETH.
A lot of it comes from BTC maximalists. But where does the disinformation come from?
The addresses of some whales helped me find leads.
First, I mapped the address movement with the number of tweets related to ETH and tweet sentiment. The first thing I noticed was that negative ETH sentiment occasionally leads to price drops.
This is "scaring away weak players", most of whom are new to ETH and don't have sufficient information to ignore the false information.
Then, I noticed a spike in whale buying after such a sell-off.
That makes sense. Whales transfer funds to exchanges and buy more ETH when the market falls.
But, this is where it gets really interesting.
Multiple addresses were transferring USDC, USDT, DAI, and Paxos to exchanges before the surge in anti-ETH tweets (tweet volume and negative sentiment spiked).
Most whale addresses move funds after sentiment spikes, responding to only 8% of these spikes. However, some addresses (seemingly outside of Asia and Europe) started moving assets before the sentiment shifted, almost never failing.
How often do these magic addresses seem to predict an increase in negative tweets?
About 86.7% of the time...
You don't need to be a data scientist to realize high correlations. Now, not all of this rise in negative sentiment will effectively move prices.
And, somehow, these whales always magically catch it. This could indicate that these addresses are actually funding these ETH panics, or distributing them via bots so they can accumulate tokens.
That sounds like a bad thing. However, if most of the funding for the Black Ethereum project comes from people trying to get involved at a better price, then that actually says something about the quality and future of the ETH project.
However, this is something I plan to investigate further. It would be ironic if some of the top BTC maximalists were funded with ETH money.
secondary title
Discovery 28: Genesis Address Hopscotch
secondary title
Discovery 29: Patient miners
Of the top 10,000 addresses, only 8 addresses were not from the genesis address and had no transfers. They are 8 miners who amassed their wealth through early mining.
All are active wallets and do not appear to be interested in selling.
secondary title
Discovery 30: Tasty DeFi
Among the top 10,000 addresses, we can also find addresses of Uniswap, Aave, Bancor, Compound, Kyber, Loopring, Nexus Mutual, Melon, and Augur.
So far, less than 6% of the top 10,000 wallets have used DeFi, which means that DeFi still has huge room for growth.
Wait for the arrival of the whales!
secondary title
Although there are not many whales participating in DeFi, the number of ETH whales participating in DeFi has more than doubled in the past 6 months. They increased their positions in all of the aforementioned projects except Loopring, Melon, and Augur.
epilogue
secondary title
Finding 32: Bullish
In the end, everything is very bullish for Ethereum.
epilogue
Whales are increasing their stake.
New whales are pouring in.
ETH is better for trading than BTC.
Compared with BTC, more funds flow into ETH.
There is less ETH than you might think.
The amount of ETH that can participate in the first round of equity pledge is not much.
Early staking returns could be as high as 17%.
Whales are accumulating tokens.
Opponents are accumulating tokens.
Miners are accumulating tokens.
ETH is as decentralized as BTC.
ETH founders still hold most of their ETH.
V God will donate 1ETH to the ecosystem for every 1ETH sold.
