Over 80 Percent of Total ETH Supply is Held by 7,572 Addresses: Research

Published at: March 9, 2019

Over 80 percent of the total circulating supply of Ethereum (ETH) is held by 7,572 addresses, claims a report released by digital asset research company Delphi Digital on March 7.

More precisely, the data contained in the report claim that over 80 percent of the total supply of ETH coins are held by addresses with a balance higher than 1,000 ETH. The number of such addresses adds up to 7,572. The research breaks down the total number of addresses by volume of ETH they contain, stating that 6,490 addresses hold between 1,000 and 10,000 ETH, 923 of them hold between 10,000 and 100,000 ETH, 155 between 100,000 and 1,000,000 ETH and only four between 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 ETH.

In the same document, the company also claims that the price of ETH has dropped an average of 19 percent after each of the past five hard forks, over the following 30 days.

Still, the most recent hard fork before last month’s Constantinople and St. Petersburg updates actually saw the price of ETH decrease by under one percent, which the report suggests is in part due to the decrease in block rewards from 5 ETH to 3 ETH.

The researchers also pointed out that as of March 3, over 2.3 million Ethereum (about 2 percent of the total supply) was present in decentralized finance apps.

Most of the ETH being staked in decentralized finance apps — reportedly 98 percent — is in MakerDAO smart contracts, which permit the creation and destruction of the Maker’s decentralized stablecoin Dai (DAI). The second decentralized finance app with the most staked ETH is the decentralized lending platform Compound, which held roughly 28,500 Ethereum as of March 3.

Lastly, the report also raises concerns over technical risks facing Ethereum in the near future. In particular, the documents points to the alleged centralization of Infura, the infrastructure-as-a-service arm of Ethereum-focused development company ConsenSys.   Infura allows DApp developers to deploy their DApps without hosting their own full node.

However, by using Infura, the report argues, developers rely on infrastructure entirely operated by ConsenSys and hosted by Amazon Web Services, which creates a single point of failure that decentralization is meant to avoid.

The report’s author, Delphi Digital, positions itself as a company aiming to produce unbiased content concerning digital assets and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and to provide analysis services to institutional clients. The company also counts Morgan Creek Digital Assets founder Anthony Pompliano as a member of its board of directors.

As Cointelegraph reported in December last year, Pompliano forecasted that Bitcoin (BTC) had still “lower to go” in the short term before it hit bottom, despite the bull run to above $4,000 that happened at the time. A month before that, he also defined Bitcoin as the world’s best-performing asset over the past ten years.Another recent report on Ethereum, this time by crypto asset management firm Electric Capital, claimed that Ethereum has the most developers working on its base protocol of all cryptocurrencies, not counting community project developers.

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Decentralization
Blockchain
Ethereum
Consensys
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