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Analysis of ethereum's top 1000 whale addresses reveals 32 secrets

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V god is true to ethereum.

Original title: 32 discoveries from analyzing ethereum's top 10,000 addresses

SIEN, blue fox notes

Foreword: among ethereum's top 10,000 addresses, the 10,000th wallet also had a balance of 748.16eth. The number one was the exchange's wallet, with more than 3.48 million ETH, accounting for less than 3.2% of ethereum's total. Ethereum's asset distribution is relatively dispersed. So what can be mined from the top 10,000 addresses? Adam Cochran shows us some interesting patterns of behavior behind these whale addresses.

I studied the top 10,000 ethereum addresses to understand their liquidity, profitability, market operations, and what whales do with their money.

Discovery & have spent 1: how many ETH are in the top 10,000 addresses

The first 10,000 addresses have 91.7 million ETH

The first 1,000 addresses have 70.7 million ETH

The top 100 have 37.8 million ETH

The top 10 have 16.6 million ETH

About 17 percent of the ETH is held by 10 addresses. Some maximalists would say that the ratio is too high, suggesting "pre-excavation" and centralised control. (blue fox note: by "maximalists" I mean hardcore bitcoin-only fans of the cryptographic community.)

But that is far from the truth. The reason is that the main thing that makes the ETH distribution look so concentrated is actually the smart contract. Unlike other tokens, ETH is actually used for a purpose.

To do this, it takes a long time for people to store their assets in smart contracts, which are often done in a way that requires no trust, meaning users can still control their assets.

WETH is a good example where we store the ETH in order to get Wrapped ETH for the standard ERC20. (blue fox notes: wETH is packaged ETH, because of the ETH is etheric fang on native tokens, it does not accord with standard of ERC20, after ETH packaging, becomes a meet ERC20 standards, can be done in decentralized direct trading platform with other tokens of) the use of intelligent contract let the distribution of the ETH appear "twisted", makes it look seem unfair. What if we removed smart contracts and focused only on exchanges, individuals and funds?

Discovery 2: distribution of ETH

When removing the smart contract, the distribution is now:

The top 100 addresses have 26.4 million ETH

The first 1,000 addresses have 42.5 million ETH

The top 10,000 addresses have 57.2 million ETH (56.7%)

Maximalists like to say that ETH is more concentrated than BTC and that it is "70% pre-dug" in Western Europe. But what happens when we directly compare the distributions of BTC and ETH?

The top 10,000 BTC addresses have 10.54 million BTC (57.44%)

The top 10,000 ETH addresses have 57.2 million ETH (56.7%)

In terms of individual holders, ethereum is as evenly distributed as bitcoin. How does it compare to other networks?

XRP 16 addresses hold 55.2% of XRP

LTC 300 addresses hold 54.3% of LTC

Tron 1031 addresses hold 51.1% of TRX

That means ethereum and bitcoin are on the same level in terms of issuing equity. And no other tokens have reached this level of distribution. (note to blue fox: this is not entirely true, welcome to the students who are familiar with the situation of other tokens.)

Discovery 3: how much ETH is there?

Like most people, you might think, there are 110,696,890 ETH. From there you start to make mistakes.

Most automated calculations on chains consider only how many ETH have been produced. They cannot count how much ETH has been lost or inaccessible. Such work can only be done manually.

We confirm that at least 6.2 million ETH has been identified as destroyed or lost, and another 3.8 million ETH may also be lost or lost. This means that about 9 percent of the ETH is no longer available, and only about 100 million ETH are actually in circulation.

This may not sound like much of a difference, but it becomes "really" important when we talk about ETH2.0 sharding benefits. ETHHub's excellent team provided us with a nice chart to look at the mortgage yield based on the amount of ETH validation.

When it reaches 100 million pledged, it drops to GIC. This will not happen because it will result in extremely low liquidity for ETH. We know that about 65 million ETH is "active." We can remove 26 million ETH from the exchange hot wallet and assume that another 20 percent of ETH is active in contracts and payments.

This reduced ETH to 76.2 million.

We could also remove 6.1 million ETH that had been destroyed, 3.8 million ETH that might have been lost, and 1.7 million ETH that had been locked. But what about the cold wallet? Trading all powerful cold wallet storage, most exchanges do not take a partial reserve approach.

However, these may change under ETH2.0 due to the incentive of equity pledge tokens.

Let's assume that some major exchanges will keep all their reserves, and some relatively minor exchanges will not. Let's say that 80% of the money in the cold wallet is still in the cold wallet state. That means we can remove 20 million ETH again.

This will leave 44.6 million ethereum that can be used to enter the mortgage in the future. But this is the absolute maximum.

So how do we estimate how much ETH will be mortgaged? We're based on the distribution of the ETH, and generally speaking, technically, we use the model of distribution, which is somewhat suitable for the standard distribution. It comes from a theory of crossing the chasm.

Basically, that means we want to adopt new technologies.

Low & have spent2.5% of innovators

Low & have spent13.5% of early adopters

Low & have spentThe early majority of 34%

These waves ultimately depend on the maturity of the product.

It is difficult to calculate how many of the 44.6 million ETH will make it to each stage. Because the percentage of crossings is not based on the ETH balance. It's based on the number of holders -- it's not a standard distribution. However, rough estimates can be made.

Low & have spent2.5% is going to be 1.15 million ETH

Low & have spent13.5% will be 6 million ETH (7.15 million ETH in total)

Low & have spent34% will be 15.1 million ETH (22.3 million ETH total)

Therefore, we can estimate that:

Low & have spentPhase 0 early pledge returns will be 17% to 20% annualized

Low & have spentOnce the pledge service is more powerful and common, it will drop to 6%-8%. (blue fox note: blue fox note predicts that the early pledge revenue of 17%-20% will not be too long. However, there is a situation that can hinder its pledge, is whether the ETH2 token can be transferred or traded. But liquidity can also be addressed in other ways.)

Once ETH2.0 is out and tradable, it will settle around 4-6%.

These early gains did not account for the destruction of eip-1559, or the increase in ETH prices. As we know, the launch of ETH2.0 will lead to some significant price changes.

Therefore, I guess the following conclusion can be drawn:

Find 4: the pledge benefit at the beginning of ETH2.0 may be 12-17% +

Finding 5:ETH is unusually active.

Of the top ETH addresses, 64.53 percent are active, meaning it has traded or consumed on an exchange in the past 30 days.

Low & have spent14.02% stored in cold wallet (unused for more than 1 year)

Low & have spent9.71% idle (not active for 31-364 days)

Low & have spent1.76% is locked in a time lock contract

It may not seem shocking at first glance, but it can be compared with the statistics for all the other ethereum addresses. Of these, 54.39% are inactive (more than 1 year), 39.93% are idle, and only 5.68% are active.

Discovery 6: whales are active and growing

This means that whale accounts are very active in this depressed market, and many of them are accumulating. Existing whale positions have increased by more than 4% in the past six months. ($550 million)

That compares with the roughly $600 million in new money that flowed into bitcoin last year. However, for ethereum, this has only happened with the whale's account, and only in the last 6 months. The whales love ETH and BTC. No other token has this level of inflows.

But perhaps more important:

Discovery 7: an influx of new whales

There are a number of new wallet addresses in the top 10, 000, which have their first trading on the fco, which serves a large number of users (mostly on Gemini, Kranken and Coinbase).

These new addresses typically buy $100,000 to $250,000 worth of ETH, and they account for about 6% of the top 10,000 addresses. In other words, they generated about $100 million in new funding to buy ETH in the past six months.

Let's repeat that over the past six months, whales have spent more than $650 million on ETH. That means that in the past six months, the whales spent more on ETH than they did on BTC last year. (blue fox note: of the 650 million, 100 million is the more reliable new inflow. And 550 million funds belong to the old address of the new position, it may be from the user with their own funds to buy, may also be from the market through trading, borrowing and other ways to earn, so, not entirely as new funds)

Discovery 8: exchanges are used as wallets

Currently, there are 33.6 million ETH deposits on the exchange (blue fox notes: about a third of the total). Only 13.7 million of them are stored in cold wallets, with most of the rest in hot ones. That means only about 40 percent of the exchange's cold wallets are stored.

But there are some winners and losers:

Discovery 9: the trading platform that stores the most ETH in a cold wallet

BitFlyer, gent.io, Coinbase, and Kraken have the largest proportion of cold and hot wallet storage. The highest reaches 78% of cold wallet storage. They don't risk using the user's cryptocurrency.

Discovery 10: trading platforms that use less cold wallet storage

On the other hand, Yobit, Poloniex, and Bithumb rely too heavily on hot wallets. The highest was 91%.

Find 11:Poloniex cold money wallet proportion changes

When Circle bought Poloniex, they moved assets to better cold wallet storage and had strong reserves. Since Poloniex was taken over by TRON, it seems that the proportion of cold wallets dropped, only partially in reserve.

Finding 12: most ETH is not being sold

Currently, there are only 19.5 million ETH to sell on the exchange. Even with 33.6m ETH on the exchange, only 58% of it is sold. So the whales are sucking, not selling.

By contrast, when ETH prices have risen by more than 25 percent, historically the number has exceeded 75 percent. For the first time in its history, ETH is up more than 50 percent and sales are below 80 percent.

The whales are hungry.

Discovery 13: unclaimed wealth

Of the top 10,000, 347 genesis addresses never claimed ETH, which they purchased in Western Europe. The abandoned funds are 1.7 million ETH, or about $340 million.

There may be other unclaimed addresses for the long tail genesis wallet. However, if these funds were used as equity collateral, they could yield more than $5 million a year.

Perhaps the ethereum community is worth exploring forking over these unclaimed funds on ETH2.0, mortgaging them, and using the proceeds to fund community projects.

Discovery 14: founder's patience

When it comes to genesis wallets, most ETH genesis members still hold most of their money. On average, developers and founders still hold 56.4% of ETH in their genesis wallet. Only two of the highest-ranked founding members sold the ETH in large Numbers. Both were sold to fund the struggling encryption business. In addition, at least two founding team members never used their genesis gift ETH.

Vitalik?

Discovery 15:V god is true to ethereum

Low & have spentAt its peak, Vitalik may have about 630,000 ETH.

Low & have spentOf these, at least 54,856 ETH were donated by him personally to external entities.

Low & have spentHe sold 167,000 ETH before 2018.

Low & have spentHe invested another 50,000ETH in EthDev.

Low & have spentThirty-five thousand ETH are used to fund other ecological projects.

That means V has sold only 26% of its ETH in the past five years, most of it when ETH prices were lower.

On the other hand, he donated at least 21% of his ETH to support the ecosystem, and he kept the rest. This breaks the narrative that ethereum was a hoax of its founders.

V god holds up to 0.9% ETH. For every ETH he sells, he donates about the same amount to the ecosystem.

This shows that V believes in ethereum's vision, and instead of using it for get-rich-quick schemes, he is spending his money where he says it should be. But, perhaps most importantly, almost all of ethereum's founders are in the same boat.

Discovery 16: creation address holder's patience

Of the top ranked claimed genesis wallet addresses, 97.4 percent still hold more than 75 percent of the ETH they originally purchased.

They were also ETH purists, with 97.4% of them never buying any other tokens.

Found 17: & have spent Other tokens at the top of the list at these ETH creation addresses

At the genesis address & Among the first 250 accounts, the 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 one or two addresses.

Find 18: average balance held

Among the top 10,000 wallet addresses, the average balance held was 9,170 ETH (about $1.8 million). In part, this is due to trading bias. The median is 1,672 ETH (about $334,000).

Discovery 19:ETH is money

The 16.2 million ETH is in "active" circulation, meaning it has passed a payment processor, a payment gateway, or a smart contract (not including exchanges or multiple signatures) in the past 90 days.

This means that ETH is actually used "heavily" for money and gas charges. In comparison, 57% of bitcoins haven't been touched in more than a year (21% haven't moved since 2015).

In the past two years, only 0.36 percent of bitcoin has gone through a payment processor. When it comes to currency, ETH USES more than 440 times bitcoin for transactions.

ETH is money. Straightforward, simple and retweetable.

Discovery 20: stockpiling of miners

Strangely enough, the miners began stockpiling. Over the past six months, the miners accumulated 1.15 million ETH, or about $230 million, and they never sold.

This is odd, since miners bear the heavy costs of their mining operations, so they rarely stock up on ETH. We have never seen such a rapid increase in demand for ETH from miners. It looks like ETH miners are preparing to turn their mining business into Staking business as Phase 0 rolls out.

This will reduce costs for miners. However, some miners continue to sell in large Numbers, which may indicate that they will not be collateral in the future. Only about 20% of the miners seem to be stockpiling, but their stockpiling is aggressive. This could mean that about 80% of miners will switch to other PoW chains. That may be good news for ETH's brother, 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 the dispersion. Either way, the miners are optimistic about the future of ETH.

Discovery 21: ETH storage explodes on trading platforms

Over the past six months, the exchange's daily ETH deposits have grown fivefold, from 11,000 a day to more than 55,000 a day. Typically, this is a major early indicator of a bear market or large selloff.

Instead, the walls are digested by the whales. Despite a five-fold increase in storage, ETH prices have risen. That means big investors have faith in ETH. In the past three times, we have seen that when the trading platform increased the amount of ETH stored in a month by 4-5 times, it caused the market price to drop by more than 40%. This is the only time so far that the opposite has happened. At present, the market is showing the main positive mood.

Found: 21 & have spent Someone is playing 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. It usually starts with BitFinex, then expands to BitMex and eventually to other exchanges.

The whales began trading in bulk to BitFinex, Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp, Bitflyer and others within days. They repeat small transactions, so systems like WhaleAlerts do not monitor their movement. Then, all of a sudden, the market sold off. They profited from their huge stake and bought it back at a lower price.

Once completed, they return the transaction to their address in batches. It sometimes took them more than two weeks to migrate the ETH back. They go back with the profit. Typically, after they sell, the wallets spend four to six weeks buying new ETH. What's really interesting is that BitFinex cold wallets seem to participate in this sell-off on a regular basis (about 40% of the time), which is surprising given how little they move.

Discovery 23: BitFinex used user funds to vote on ProgPoW

BitFinex took 1.17 million ETH from its hot wallet to its cold wallet to vote on ProgPow. Only about 3 million ETH (https://web.archive.org/web/20190402164923/http://www.progpowcarbonvote.com/) participated in the voting process, this means that BitFinex represent more than 40% of the vote. Moreover, it is not the only vote operation around ProgPoW.

Criticism swirled around NVIDA and AMD, and GPU data centers helped fund ProgPoW. (https://www.trustnodes.com/2019/01/10/rumors-circulate-after-eth-devs-suddenly-decide-a-proof-of-work-change) & have spent Not surprisingly, we identified 36 other cold wallet addresses that voted in favor of ProgPoW and then sat idle again. This confirmed what most people had suspected. The community doesn't want ProgPoW. The big selfish team wants ProgPoW.

Discovery 24: stealth of Coinbase

The best cover for trading is Coinbase. They added new wallets and used a mix of funds in all outbound transactions, making it hard to identify. We can easily identify the source and destination of 80% of the trades from all other exchanges. Only Coinbase (and Tornado. Cash) makes it hard to identify.

Found 25: & have spent Big players are buying

We can also see wallets associated with big players like JPMorgan Chase, Reddit, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Walmart.

100% of these wallets are accumulating ETH. It is unclear what its purpose is, where it fits into the corporate structure or whether it is a formal plan for the company.

But it is clear that their accumulation is growing at this price point, and they are betting on ETH in some way.

Find 26: wealth = patience

The whales whose net worth has grown fastest in the past three years are patient people. They rarely sell ETH.

They also never bought tokens on occidental, always waiting months after they hit the market until their price dropped.

Discovery 27: who is the greatest hate of ETH?

There was a lot of talk against the ETH. Many of these come from the maximalists of BTC. But where does the disinformation come from? Some whale addresses help me find clues.

First, I mapped the address movement to the number of tweets associated with ETH and the twitter mood. The first thing I noticed was that negative ETH sentiment occasionally caused prices to fall. This is "scare away the weak hand", most of whom are new to the ETH and do not have enough information to ignore the false information.

Then I noticed a spike in whale buying after such a selloff. That makes sense. Whales move money into exchanges and buy more ETH when markets fall. But that's where it gets really interesting.

Before the spike in anti-eth tweets (a spike in tweets and negative sentiment), multiple addresses were transferring USDC, USDT, DAI and Paxos to exchanges. Most whale sites move money after emotional peaks, responding to only 8% of those peaks. But before the mood changes, some addresses (outside Asia and Europe, it seems) start moving assets, and almost never fail.

How often do these magical addresses seem to predict an increase in negative tweets? About 86.7% of the time...

You don't have to be a data scientist to be aware of high correlations. Now, not all of these increases in negative sentiment will be effective in driving prices. In fact, it works less than 7 percent of the time. But once it works, it works. And somehow the whales always managed to catch it. This may suggest that the addresses are actually funding the ETH's panic, or spreading through robots so that they can accumulate tokens.

That sounds like a bad thing. But if most of the money for the black ethereum project comes from people who are trying to participate at a better price, it says a lot about the quality and future of the ETH project. As far as its value is concerned, I (so far) do not believe that any maximalists against ETH's BTC participated in this manipulation. They were more likely to tip/sponsor anonymously, and the robot relayed their emotions.

However, this is something I plan to study further. It would be ironic if some of the top BTC maximalists were funded by ETH money.

Discovery 28: creation address hopscotch

On average, there are only about a dozen wallet transactions from genesis. It is equivalent to the "six degree relationship" of ethereum.

Find 29: the patient miner

Of the top 10,000 addresses, only 8 were not from the creation address and were not transferred. They were eight miners who had accumulated wealth by digging early. All are active wallets and seem uninterested in selling.

Find 30: delicious DeFi

Of the top 250 wallets, only the TokenSets, Tornado.Cash and Maker are used by individual owners. Also found in the top 10, 000 are addresses for Uniswap, Aave, Bancor, Compound, Kyber, Loopring, Nexus Mutual, Melon, and Augur.

So far, less than 6% of the top 10,000 wallets have DeFi, which means there's still plenty of room for growth. DeFi has locked up $800 million in funding, much of it from individual microwallets. Wait for the whales!

Find 31: double DeFi

Although the number of whales participating in DeFi is still small, the number of ETH whales participating in DeFi has more than doubled in the past six months. They increased their positions in all of these projects, except for Loopring, Melon, and Augur.

Find 32: bullish

In the end, it's all very bullish for ethereum.

conclusion

lowWhales are increasing their share of the equity.

lowNew whales are coming in.

lowETH is better for trading than BTC.

lowMore money flowed into ETH than into BTC.

lowThere's less ETH than you might think.

lowIn the first round, there is not much ETH that can participate in equity pledge.

lowEarly pledge returns can be as high as 17%.

lowThe whales are accumulating tokens.

lowOpponents are accumulating tokens.