Dispelling Some Myths about the distribution of Basic Attention Token (BAT)
There is a lot of misinformation about the distribution of the Basic Attention Token (BAT). The two biggest and most persistent myths are that:
- Only about 190 people hold BAT.
- There is a person—a “whale”—who owns approximately 25% of all BAT.
Both of these claims are false and make for awfully stale, outdated news. Yet, they continue to be repeated over and over ad nauseam.
Let’s start with the first:
Only about 190 people hold BAT.
This was true right after the ICO, but is no longer. In the roughly two weeks since the BAT ICO, the number of wallets that hold BAT has increased from 190 to over 3675 (as of June 13, 2017). The growth in hands has been consistent and continues as more and more BAT is traded on the exchanges. (See the “Token Holders” tab over at Etherscan: https://etherscan.io/token/BAT#balances.)
For comparison, the number of addresses that hold Gnosis (GNO), another highly popular token, stands at a meagre 2238. Gnosis, moreover, held its ICO back in April, while it’s only been two weeks since the initial BAT offering.
(As a benchmark, we might look at a fan-favourite token like Golem’s GNT, which has over 28500 holders. Golem’s ICO, however, was all the way back in 2016.)
Of course, there are factors that might skew these numbers in either direction: e.g., (i) People who hold their BAT in an exchange (which would underreport the number of real individuals who actually hold BAT); (ii) people who’ve split their holdings across multiple wallets (which would overstate the number of real individuals holding BAT).
In general, though, it is safe to say that the distribution of BAT has been widening. Onto the second, more ridiculous myth:
There is a person — a “whale” — who owns approximately 25% of all BAT.
In the same way lay analysts like to take screenshots of book depth charts, pictures of the BAT distribution piechart have been making the rounds in the cryptocurrency community. (See here for the current pie chart.)
Most people have been horrified to see a quarter of the pie being painted a single colour. From a quick glance at the piechart, many people have come to believe that there is a whale out there (presumably one of the big bad whales who helped steal the ICO) who controls something like 25% of all BAT—holding the fate of BAT at his mercy.
But this is completely wrong, and so obviously wrong that it’s almost funny. That 25% is actually just the portion of BAT initially allocated to the user growth + development pool, as programmed into the original token smart contract… The next big slice is the official development pool that’s under a 6 month lockup.
“But what about those other big slices at like 8%?” They’re exchange addresses, and exchange addresses don’t count. For example, the biggest external address (which holds over 8.7% of all BAT, at the time of this writing) is just Bittrex.
“Still,” one might object, “the top 100 addresses hold 94% of all BAT!” True, but not so bad considering the top 100 GNOSIS addresses own over 99 percent of GNO tokens. Fan-favourite GNT is only a little better at 80%. Other well-known tokens, like Augur’s REP, sit at around 77%. Iconomi, 90%. Remember, BAT only came out two weeks ago and has only been tradable on a couple smaller exchanges.
For holders of BAT, the hope is that when these false beliefs are corrected, BAT will see a resurgence as public confidence is restored.
Indeed, perhaps in light of all the controversy that has surrounded subsequent ICOs (e.g., Bancor) and all the future controversy that’s sure to accompany the many ICOs still left to debut in the coming weeks, people will look back at the BAT ICO and think, “Hey, maybe it wasn’t so bad.”
