QUOTE 78.11% of the supply is concentrated in the hands of 0.12% of holders
Following the release of the $ICP holder breakdown, based on our recently introduced “marine hierarchy” ranking, we’ve noticed some negative sentiment in the comments regarding the significant concentration of the current supply in few hands. Nearly 395M or 78.11% of the total supply, is held by “Humpback” wallets, which possess over 100k $ICP
As of now, there are approximately 720 addresses above this threshold, roughly accounting for 0.12% of existing addresses with non-zero balances. This disparity raises concerns: 78.11% of the supply is concentrated in the hands of 0.12% of holders… However, it’s crucial to contextualize this within the narrative of InternetComputer being a relatively young project, live and listed for just over two years.
Let’s draw parallels: it’s common for a new company’s ownership to be concentrated among founders and early investors at its inception. Over time, as the project grows, more investors join, often leading to a more equitable wealth distribution. Consider Bitcoin as a closer crypto-tech analogy: at its genesis, wealth was predominantly held by miners, akin to early investors in the technology. Over time, their share diminished, resulting in a more equitable distribution today, as you can see in this chart:
Returning to ICP, the so-called “Humpback” holders, who currently hold the majority of the supply, include both free wallets and neurons with varying vesting periods. In my opinion, they should be viewed as early investors in the technology, whose wealth will gradually be distributed to other stakeholders over time. Therefore, stay tuned as we keep you updated on the evolution of these metrics in the coming years…
Looks like a pretty bad metric considering the cost of making a new non-zero ICP account is 0,002$ while making a new non-zero ETH account is 2$. So anyone who can script on the ICP can change this stat from 0.12% to 0.03%? at the cost of 2k$ for few hours.
Thanks to @delia for putting this information together. It’s useful to help understand the distribution of ICP across wallets and direction it’s heading. A few pieces of context I’d like to add into the conversation:
Of the 395M mentioned above:
At least 59.1M are held by exchange hot and cold wallets. These wallets are obviously custodial for ICP owned by many, many people.
Thank you @Kyle_Langham for adding valuable details to our research. I would like to add some other observations of mine:
You mentioned that 59.1M are the ICPs owned by exchange hot and cold wallets, unfortunately the latter do not yet provide the addresses to the public as proof of reserves so it is rather difficult for me to verify whether they fall into the selection of addresses with more than 100k ICPs or not , as exchanges may also have cold and hot wallets below this threshold. In any case, assuming that they fall into the selection, I would still like to add that the risk of centralization persists even though they are assets of the various clients, as history teaches us.
Another observation, this time arising in the comments of my posts, among the X community is the centralization of voting power. You mentioned that 56+29.2M of ICPs are owned by the foundation and that another 10.5M by the ICA, again I don’t know if all of them fall under the lens of addresses with more than 100k ICPs, however assuming this is the case and removing the cold exchange reserves and hot, given that they should have no voting power, we still obtain a fairly high value, i.e. around 309.8 ICP concentrated in very few hands, we are still talking about just over 60% of the total supply.
Therefore, using your “wallets with balances >= 100k ICP” data and those of “meaningful wallets” we can say that in any case approximately 60% of the voting power is concentrated in the hands of 0.73% of “meaningful wallets”. Not to mention the neurons that delegate voting power to the foundation…
Finally, I would like to point out another question that has arisen among the community, namely that part of these wallets could belong to the treasurers of the SNS projects. In this case I carried out a search yesterday, where it turned out that approximately just 4.4M ICPs fall under this particularity. Here is my post: https://x.com/deliacapital/status/1757806920197382404
Having said that, although with these additional filters that we are applying, perhaps sometimes not entirely accurate, as mentioned before, I would say that the bottom line of reasoning remains quite solid.
Beyond all this, I would like to emphasize that, as I have already expressed with my community on X, I believe that the initial partial “centralization” is completely normal and physiological and that I am convinced of the fact that even if there is control of the foundation, and/or the initial investors (or any other similar entity), they always act and will always act in the interest of the longevity of the project and I believe that in the long run there will be a more equitable distribution of wealth as seen in the bitcoin example.
