Original Article Title: Who Controls SOL? Mapping the 605M Coin Supply (Work In Progress)

Original Article Author: Ignas, DeFi Researcher

Original Article Translation: Luffy, Foresight News

This is a simple question born out of curiosity. Last year, I wrote an article about "Where Did Ethereum Tokens Go." Subsequently, @0xEekeyguy created a fantastic public dashboard to query Ethereum's token distribution.

So, what about SOL?

Where Is SOL Hiding?

Disclaimer: This article is still a work in progress. I need everyone's help to validate the data and provide new information about the current state of SOL and its ownership.

88% of SOL's total supply is in circulation.

Source: https://solanacompass.com/tokenomics, https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/

Solana's total supply has no limit, with the current inflation rate at 4.395%, decreasing by 15% annually. The final inflation rate should stabilize at 1.5%.

Source: https://www.helius.dev/blog/solana-staking-simplified-guide-to-sol-staking

It is worth noting that 71% of SOL's circulating supply is in active staking, while ETH's equivalent is 30%.

Source: https://solscan.io/analysis/solana_staking

However, according to Solanacompass.com data, within this staked amount, 6.7% is locked SOL (held by VCs, insiders, and the team)?

Source: https://solanacompass.com/tokenomics

Yet, I struggle to understand what these locked tokens are and who they belong to.

Per Messari's data, 99.88% of SOL tokens have completed unlocking. The only "locked" tokens are 600,000 SOL held by FTX (potentially already sold via OTC transactions).

Source: https://solana.messari.io/token-unlocks

So, what are the 11.2% locked tokens reported by Solanacompass and CoinMarketCap? It is currently unclear.

Who Holds SOL?

According to Arkham Intelligence data, Coinbase holds $5 billion worth of SOL, representing 4.7% of SOL's total supply.

Source: https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/token/solana

Here are other major holders sorted by circulating supply percentage:

· Binance — 3.97%

· Jito — 1.61%

· Upbit — 1.28%

· OKx — 1.19%

· Alameda — 0.92% (potentially part of the locked tokens identified by Messari?)

· Marinade Finance — 0.79%

· Robinhood — 0.74%

· Kraken——0.53%

· Bybit——0.49%

· Jump Crypto——0.33%

· Crypto.com——0.33%

· Wintermute——0.14%

· Bitstamp——0.13%

Overall, Arkham's statistics show that the top holders hold approximately 20% or more of the circulating supply, which is quite significant.

We can also find more relevant institutions by querying staking entities on Dune.

Source: https://dune.com/the_defi_report/solana-staking-and-validators

In addition to the institutions mentioned above (Binance, Coinbase), we see that Helius holds 2.5% of the active staking supply.

The amount of SOL held by Galaxy is also quite substantial, reaching 8.8 million tokens, along with institutions like Ledger, Figment, Kiln1, and Everstake.

Many of the top-ranking wallets have not yet been identified.

To achieve network decentralization, the Solana Foundation has delegated 35.6 million SOL (6.6% of the circulating supply) to 542 validators.

According to @0xEekeyguy, validators need to stake at least 50,000 to 75,000 SOL to be profitable.

Surprisingly, only 14.3% of the staked SOL comes from Liquidity Staking Tokens (LST) (10.5% of the circulating supply). Jito is a leader in this area.

This limits the growth potential of DeFi on Solana. If a few more percentage points of native staked SOL are moved to LST, Solana's DeFi ecosystem's scale could increase by several billion dollars.

Individual Holders

Disclaimer: I attempt to estimate individual holder counts through AI data analysis, which is likely to be inaccurate.

Based on this experimental data, the amount of SOL held by 120 wallets is equivalent to the total holdings of under 1,000 SOL wallets, totaling 8.9 million.

The average balance of SOL wallets is: 16.8 SOL (affected by small holders, data is skewed).

Overall:

· Concentration: 0.33% of wallets (30,220) control 54% of SOL's supply (including centralized exchanges, custodians, etc.).

· Retail Dominance: 97.4% of wallets hold less than 1,000 SOL, holding a total of 24.8% of the supply.
Original Post Link

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia