A new on-chain study conducted by Arcam Intelligence this week found that the wallet addresses currently holding the most ETH are not individuals, exchanges, or ETF issuers, but the staking contracts that secure Ethereum.
According to Arkham, the ETH2 beacon deposit contract currently holds more than 72.4 million ETH, equivalent to approximately $252 billion at current market value, and accounting for approximately 60% of the total supply.
Ethereum Power Center
As for individuals, the research firm has confirmed that the largest known individual holder of ETH remains Rain Roems, founder of Estonian bank LHV, who bought 250,000 ETH in a pre-sale in 2014 for around $75,000. These coins would now be worth approximately $871 million, but Mr. Romes lost his private key several years ago and is unable to access them.
The second largest identifiable individual holder is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who currently holds about 240,000 ETH (worth about $840 million).
Beyond individual wallets, centralized exchanges and institutions collectively control some of the largest pools of Ether. For example, Binance holds approximately 4.09 million ETH, while asset management company BlackRock holds approximately 3.94 million ETH, mainly related to the iShares Ethereum Trust ETF. Coinbase is the next largest institutional investor, holding approximately 3.5 million ETH in multiple addresses, including cold wallets and staking reserves for the cbETH staking token.
This is followed by Upbit, Robinhood, Kraken, OKX, and Bitfinex among the top institutional holders.
Seized Funds, Stolen Funds, and Layer 2 Bridging
Mr. Arkham discovers that the government is also featured on the leaderboard. For example, the US government controls approximately 60,000 ETH, the majority of which is comprised of seized criminal funds, such as from the Potapenko/Turogin scandal and seizures related to the Bitfinex hacker.
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Several well-known hacker wallets remain among large holders, including one controlled by Gatecoin Exploiter, which continues to hold over 156,000 ETH stolen in 2016. On the infrastructure side, the Wrapped Ether (WETH) contract holds over 2.2 million ETH and represents the supply of WETH minted to make ETH compatible with the ERC-20 standard.
The dataset shows that native Layer 2 bridges also accounted for the majority of locked ETH, including 833,000 ETH deposited in Arbitrum’s native bridge and approximately 723,000 ETH deposited in Base’s bridge. Overall, the latest on-chain data identifies staking agreements, exchanges, ETF issuers, bridges, and custody platforms as the largest known entities currently holding Ether.
