New Chainalysis Research shows that a third of the Ether’s (ETH) supply is owned by just 376 people

A new Chainalysis research report published on May 15 states that a third of the world’s ether (ETH) is owned by just 376 people. These whales hold their coins on cold wallets, rather than on exchanges, according to a senior analyst of Chainalysis, Kim Grauer.

Despite controlling a large portion of ETH’s circulating supply, the study found these “whales” are responsible for just 7% of all transaction activity. Chainalysis concluded that ETH whales do not impact the coin’s price much and that they do not transfer their crypto riches between wallets often.

Image Source: Chainalysis

However, the study shows that when a whale does transfer their ETH from a wallet to an exchange, the impact on market volatility is small but substantial from a statistical point of view. After analyzing the data from 2016-19 accounting for three including Bitcoin price, Whales sending to exchanges and Whales receiving from exchanges the research firm found that:

• Ether prices follow Bitcoin prices. 
• Funds sent do impact volatility but not price.
• Funds received have no impact.

Chainalysis also recently expanded its real-time transaction monitoring tools to cover 10 cryptocurrencies in response to demand from law enforcement agencies.

The firm also did an analysis of Bitcoin whales, 20% of BTC is owned by 448 people which is not as centralized as Ethereum. Over time Crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum tend to get more decentralized with better distribution of the supply.

According to Coinmarketcap, Ethereum (ETH) is valued at $241.3 losing over 8% in value in the past day. However, ETH is still up over 38% since last week and is currently the second largest Cryptocurrency with a market cap of $25.6 Billion.

In other ETH news:

Leading Electrical Company EDF teams up with Ethereum based dApp iExec

Samsung soon to introduce Ethereum wallet in Budget Galaxy Phones

Fluidity to develop the first Ethereum powered mortgages in New York and California

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