- The top 10 ETH holders have a combined balance of $51.6 billion.
- Long-term holders are determined not to sell.
Five years ago, the top 10 Ethereum [ETH] exchange and non-exchange addresses held about 11.2% of the total supply. But now the top holders have expanded their reach in the distribution of the altcoin king, Santiment revealed.
Read Ethereum [ETH] Price prediction 2023-2023
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According to Santiment, the top 10 addresses now account for 34.6% of the total ETH supply. These coins are valued at $51.6 billion, which is equivalent to 27.86 million ETH.
???? #Ethereum has seen its top 10 addresses expand and accumulate more and more of the total coin supply available. In 5 years time, the top 10 largest addresses have gone from 11.2% to now 34.6% $ETH. The 27.86M $ETH added is worth $51.6 billion. ???? https://t.co/utI8W6DkRX pic.twitter.com/klgb7pus7K
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) August 9, 2023
From March 2022, the on-chain analytics platform reported that cohort holdings increased by 4.3% from 2021. This increase caused supply to jump to 23.7%.
So, the staggering jump this year implies that whales’ belief that ETH would be largely profitable in the short-term may have increased. But was that also the case with the retail brigade?
Well, the data from Santiment showed that the situation was not the same. Based on the information accessed at the time of writing, the balance of addresses has decreased by between 0.1 and 100 coins.
While the total supply grabbed by this cohort didn’t reach 10%, the fall in the balance suggests that most retailers have sold a significant portion of their holdings.
Source: Sentiment
The difference in accumulation between whales and retail also implies that sentiment towards long-term value has diverged.
Still not off ETH
Well, possession dominance by whales does not mean that ETH will not face a decline in the short term. This was because the open interest in exchanges was at quite a high level.
Open interest tracks each open position in a given contract rather than tracking the total volume traded.
High open interest usually indicates an increase in the liquidity of a contract. This generally means that there is only a small difference between the market price and the price set in the contract. Therefore, open long and short positions can be significant.
In addition, realized market cap HODL waves fell to 1,307. Similar to the regular HODL waves, the Realized Cap HODL wave chart shows how an asset’s supply is distributed across different coin age groups.
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One can also explain the metric as a measure of the combined USD values of all coins when they were transferred to or purchased by a new owner from a previous one.
Source: Sentiment
Therefore, the fall in ETH realized cap HODL waves implies that the majority of coin owners are unlikely to sell. So many can hold on for a long time.