Nansen: Tracking the on-chain behavior of early Ethereum ICO participants, who is the most loyal Holder?
Original source: Nansen
Original source: Nansen
What does this research report try to reveal?
This report aims to investigate the external account (EOA) on-chain behavior of Ethereum ICO participants with on-chain data to help answer the following questions:
Who is the most loyal Ethereum Holder, who has never sold
Who is currently the most active whale player on the chain?
What are the main Web3 protocols currently used by ETH ICO participant wallets?
Who is the favorite cross-chain bridge among ETH ICO participants?
How much ETH did ETH ICO participants stake on the ETH 2.0 Beacon Chain?
Are these wallets currently bullish as indicated by their Eth balances over time?
core point of view
The balance of ETH tokens held in the wallet addresses of early Ethereum ICO participants has been declining, mainly due to transfers to other external accounts (EOAs) or CEX exchanges.
By setting the filter conditions, the wallet address of the ICO participant, the transaction volume on the chain is greater than 250,000 US dollars, and currently only 5 wallets meet this condition. This could mean that many of these wallets are either dormant, not very active, or that Eth tokens have been spread across multiple different wallet addresses.
Direct deposits of ETH 2.0 pledges into beacon chain ETH 2.0 stakes from ETH ICO participants’ wallets have increased this year, but only represent a small fraction of the total ETH token balance received by ETH ICOs.
The cross-chain bridges with the most interactions with the wallet addresses of ETH ICO participants include: Polygon, ZKsync, Optimism, Arbitrum, Wormhole, Multichain, Hop protocol, xDAI omnibridge and dYdX L2 perp bridge.
The largest token balance in the ETH ICO participants' wallets is mainly ETH tokens. Other tokens include MKR, USDC, OMG, ENJ, VERI, RPL, WBTC, DAI, xDATA, RARI, WETH, MANA, LINK, and NMR.
Top Web3 protocols interacting with top 100 ETH IC participant wallets include ETH 2 Beacon Chain, Balancer, Aave, Convex, Bancor.
Most ETH ICO participants transfer most of their ETH tokens to exchanges and other unmarked wallet addresses, decentralizing, leading to difficulty in tracking and high confusion of wallet addresses.
Definition of Ethereum ICO Participants, and Why Survey Them?
ETH ICO participants are OG addresses that received ETH tokens from Ethereum Genesis.
In this report, we scope ETH ICO participants to EOA (non-entity) addresses to get a quick look at Ethereum OG to see if they are bullish on Ethereum's future, active, and recent active wallets in general for that segment.
The purpose of this report is to gain a better understanding of the current crypto world through the lens of OG since the creation of ETH. This may add some color to the trends observed in this report related to tokens, protocols, and general on-chain activity.
Overview of wallet (EOA) balances of ETH ICO participants
Over time, are ETH ICO participant wallet addresses unanimously optimistic about the future of ETH, bullish? Wallet balances of ETH ICO participants have steadily declined since 2020, with ETH balances falling 64% from 4.11 million ETH to 2.59 million ETH from January 2020 to November 2022. Despite the downward trend in ETH balances, there are other factors that could have contributed to this decline — multiple hops in ETH transfers from other EOAs, deposits to exchanges, and deployment of ETH as collateral to specific DeFi applications. Given that most of the large whales and early investors had multiplied their investments, this resulted in a massive sell-off in ETH. Since the beginning of 2022, more than 41% of the premine supply of ETH (a total of more than 10 million ETH) has been sent to exchanges.
ETH ICO ParticipantsTop ETH Balance Wallets
Here are the top 10 ETH ICO participant wallet addresses with the highest ETH balances:
For the purposes of this analysis, ETH ICO recipient wallets were further filtered using Traces Activity in 2022. Sub-transactions that occur "inside" are called Trace and include the following functions:
Call: Used to call the smart contract function specified by the parameters in the data field and/or transfer Ether from one account to another.
Create: Used to create a smart contract and then send ether to the new smart contract.
Suicide: This is used by the owner of the smart contract to terminate the smart contract. When the contract terminates, initiate the transfer of ether for a refund. Additionally, terminating a smart contract frees up blockchain memory, which may have an impact on the value transferred.
Traces activity is used as a proxy for wallet activity, and 2022 Traces activity is filtered into the dataset to find potential ETH ICO participants active in 2022.
The list below shows the top 10 ETH ICO participants EOA wallets with recent Traces activity in 2022:
Popular Protocols for ETH ICO Participant Wallet (EOA) Interaction
Summary overview
The chart below shows an aggregated view of the protocol balances held by the top 100 ETH ICO recipient EOA wallets with the highest ETH balances in recent activity in 2022.
ETH 2.0 constitutes the largest balance currently held in wallets of ETH ICO participants with activity in 2022. The total amount of ETH staked in ETH 2.0 is currently $4.05 million. The many different token balances in this segment hold a total of $257 million, mostly composed of ETH, followed by the other tokens in the chart above.
The top 5 protocols currently used by the top 100 ETH ICO participants EOA wallets The top 5 protocols currently used by the top 100 ETH ICO participants EOA wallets are ETH 2, Balancer, Aave V2, and Convex. This section takes a deep dive into how the wallets of ETH ICO recipients interact with each protocol.
These are the wallets participating in ETH 2.0 staking with a total value of $4.05 million:
These are the wallets on Balancer and the pools they use, with a combined value of $559k: ETH ICO participant holds 238 K positions in Balancer's WBTC + WETH + USDC pool and 225 K in the BAL + WETH pool K's position.
ETH ICO Participant These are the wallets on Aave and the mining pools they use, with a combined value of $497,000:
Use WBTC and WETH as collateral to borrow USDC on Aave
ETH ICO participants have small remaining borrowing positions on Aave and WETH, mainly on Yearn Finance and STE CRV.
ETH ICO ParticipantThese are the wallets on Convex and the pools they use, with a combined value of $289k:
Mining at Convex's CVXFXSFXS - F pools with $ 207 K.
ETH ICO participants hold only a small stake in Convex's CVXCRV pool, but still have $132,000 in Yearn Finance's STECRV.Friendly reminder: availableNansen On-Chain Alerts
Track these addresses.
What about those dormant ETH ICO whales?
The aforementioned top 5 wallet balance addresses have approximately 100% ETH holdings, which, combined with the wallets being dormant, could indicate that the original owners may not have access to these wallets.
To dig deeper into high-signal wallets, the analysis investigates the original counterparty EOA of “ETH ICO participants.” This allowed us to gain insight into other early OGs in the space that may be relevant to ICO participants. From the analysis, we conclude that ETH ICO counterparty wallets primarily hold tokens from the following protocols, with $1.1 billion holding tokens, mostly ETH:
ETH ICO Counterparties of Counterparties Wallets primarily utilize the following protocols, where $2.2 billion is held in tokens, mostly ETH:
Eth balances in exchange wallets compared to ETH ICO participants
As mentioned earlier, the ETH holdings of ETH ICO participants have been gradually declining. This trend was amplified in late April 2022, when we observed a ~9% drop in ETH holdings from late April to late June.
On the other hand, we see more volatility in ETH balances on exchanges, especially in mid-September 2022, when ETH balances spike as traders level off after receiving ETH PoW airdrops as part of an Ethereum merger event. Lost their long spot ETH trade.
Top 20 ETH ICO addresses with at least 1 on-chain transaction in 2022
overview
overview
Some common activity we noticed in these wallets is worth highlighting.
Use Argent Wallet to store their ETH via multiple addresses.
Some addresses started reducing their ETH positions in January 2022 and June 2022. (albeit a small fraction of their total ETH holdings)
Borrow DAI with ETH as collateral on MakerDao's Oasis.
Stake batches of 32 ETH to run multiple validators.
Active EOA Eth ICO participants transacted over $250K in the past quarter
overview
overview
Most ETH ICO participant wallets are inactive. However, the ones that have been active recently are:
ETH ICO Recipient 1 was particularly active, bridging on NEAR and Arbitrum via the Rainbow bridge, and actively participating in LP pools using protocols such as Aave, Sushi, and Ribbon finance.
ETH ICO Receiver 2: 42.eth has been relatively active in staking stETH liquidity and has been steadily increasing staked ETH balances this year.
ETH ICO recipient 3: bpeters.ethis is an NFT collector with a large amount of funds transferred to DAI-USDC LP and is still holding Cryptopunk NFT.
ETH ICO recipient 4 is an active Tornado Cash user.
ETH ICO Taker 5 appears to have a bullish view on Chainlink, holding $420,000 worth of LINK tokens. He also recently bridged the Avax bridge.
ETH ICO participants using cross-chain bridges
The Polygon bridge had the most interactions with ETH ICO recipient wallets, followed by ZKsync, Optimism, Arbitrum, Wormhole, Multichain, Hop Protocol, xDAI omnibridge, and dYdX L2 perp bridge. ETH ICO recipients are mostly bullish on bridge-based EVMs, but more importantly, the trend to use trust-minimized bridges with layer 2 continues.
Benchmark trading activity between ETH ICO participants and the broader market
However, upon further analysis, we noticed that the majority of outgoing transactions recorded during these spikes were attributed to a specific wallet that involved transferring/wrapping large numbers of Etheria NFTs (Etheria was the first true NFT project in history , deployed in October 2015 and demonstrated at DEVCON 1). In addition to this, we also observed that one of the addresses dumped ETH near the market bottom on June 16, 2022.
epilogue
epilogue
