Ethereum Whales Own 33% of ETH total Circulating Supply

Whales have been described as a a small group of people who control a substantial amount of a cryptocurrency’s total supply. While whales may not be active in terms of transactions on the blockchain, their wallets hold enough of the cryptocurrency to “control the market” as some people allege. A recent report reveals just 376 whales control 33% of the 106 million circulating ETH. This was recently discovered in a research by Chainanalysis.

The research revealed that among the top 500 ETH holders (whales), 124 were services while the remaining 376 were individuals who traditionally hold their digital assets in cold wallets and not on exchanges. These 376 were found to control the 33% of ETH in circulation. Although the actual amount of ETH was not mentioned, that could be a major fraction as there are millions of ETH holders worldwide.

The research also found something interesting which is contrary to popular belief that whales control prices. However, it did confirm that whales can cause volatility to increase if they suddenly start moving their enormous wealth on the blockchain.

Another interesting find from the research is that the amount of ETH controlled by whales has actually reduced from 47% in 2016 to the current 33%. Chainanalysis considers this an improvement and an indication that the Ethereum market is maturing and less will be controlled by whales as the market matures even further.

Also as already established, the research confirmed that Ethereum price always moves at the same pace with Bitcoin’s, and funds sent to whales do not affect the asset price or volatility. In summary, the firm stated:

“Although it seems that concerns about the impact of whales on market prices have been overstated, there are still important caveats to our research. We cannot rule out the possibility that whales can impact price changes within single days based on outlier events. Our research analyzed the general impact of flows from Ether whales, and did not exclusively look at the impact of outlier events.”

Meanwhile Ethereum has been at the forefront of altcoin recovery but has lately been taken over by Stellar XLM as the altcoins retrace a bit. The market is expected to favour alts as long as Bitcoin dominance continues to dip as it is doing right now. Otherwise, things may return to the former state for the altcoins while Bitcoin continues to soar.