There has always been a concern that bitcoin whales can and do manipulate the markets by offloading large quantities of them at any given time. We have seen the results time and time again, the best example being the Mt Gox sales. The question of whether other altcoins can suffer the same fate should be raised, especially since so few addresses contain so many coins for many of them.
Research on six independent snapshots of EOS property has shown that only ten addresses account for nearly 50% of the total offering. Almost 500 million EOS tokens, equivalent to 49.67% of the total of 1 billion shipped, are stored at 10 addresses. The company behind the EOS ICO, Block.one, holds 100 million tokens, or 10% of the total. In addition to the $ 4 billion they already raised, they will receive another $ 1.5 billion.
The other nine addresses are difficult to distinguish, but the smallest contains 20.6 million and the other eight addresses contain 380 million EOS tokens. This makes the top ten EOS holders very powerful indeed. They can do pretty much what they want with the market if they agree as a unit.
However, it has been speculated that exchanges could be responsible for these addresses, and the top traders for EOS right now are Bithumb, Huobi, OKEx, Upbit, and Bitfinex in that order. The total trading volume across the top 5 is currently $ 832 million. The total trading volume for EOS in the past 24 hours was just under $ 1.5 billion, which is more than half the volume for these five exchanges. Binance and Block.one addresses probably make up two more of the top ten EOS rich lists.
The published figures also indicated how powerful the top 1000 addresses were. Together, the top 1000 addresses contain 858,120,383 tokens, or nearly 86% of the total. It has been speculated that the rest of the EOS holders had very little impact on the ecosystem;
“For everyone else ranked 1001 or lower on the EOS Rich List, that would still only be worth 13.86% of the vote, even if all of the remaining 162,930 accounts voted the same, and we always would nor need the support of those at the top 1000 to vote just like us. If the top 1000 (or even the top 100 or less) decide which route to take, there is nothing the remaining 162,930 accounts can do about it. “
This scenario is likely to be similar for many of the major cryptocurrencies, so we still have a long way to go before any of them can claim to be truly “decentralized”.
Comments are closed.