The 10k Audit.

Adam Cochran
19 min readApr 29, 2020

I manually audited the top 10,000 Ethereum addresses to learn about liquidity, profitability, market manipulation and what Whales are doing with their money.

This is the first of many reports to come from this data set.

Finding #1 — How Much ETH is in the Top 10k Addresses?

The top 10k addresses represent 91.7M ETH.

The top 1k addresses represent 70.7M ETH.

The top 100 addresses represent 37.8M ETH.

The top 10 addresses represent 16.6M ETH.

Roughly 17% ETH is held by 10 addresses.

Some maximalists my scream that this is too high and proves a “premine” and centralized control.

But, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reason ETH’s distribution seems so focused is actually smart contracts.

Unlike some other currencies, ETH actually gets used for a purpose.

A lot of time that purpose requires depositing something into a contract, often in a trustless manner in which you still control the asset.

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Adam Cochran

Partner@Cinneamhain Ventures, Privacy Advocate, Adjunct Professor, and Growth&CorpDev Strategy at DuckDuckGo.com