Shiba Inu’s 10 Largest Whales Hold 61% Of Supply, A Worrying Fact?

On-chain data suggests Shiba Inu is among the altcoins with the highest concentration of wealth among the largest addresses on the network.

Shiba Inu, Polygon Have A High Concentration Of Supply On Top 10 Whales

In a new post on X, the on-chain analytics firm Santiment has discussed about how some of the top assets in the cryptocurrency sector line up against each other in terms of the percentage of the circulating supply held by the ten largest wallets on the network.

The ten largest addresses on any blockchain would naturally correspond to the largest investors present in the market, who are humongous even in whale terms.

Below is the chart shared by the analytics firm that shows the trend in the combined holdings for such entities for different assets in the sector.

As is visible in the graph, Polygon (MATIC) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) are the top two coins in the sector in terms of this metric right now. The top 10 wallets own 69.4% of the entire circulating supply of the former, while the metric stands at 61.2% for the latter.

Before this year, Chainlink (LINK) was at the top of the list, but the coin’s supply has seen significant distribution as it’s now seventh with 31.1% of the supply in the hands of the mega whales.

Besides Polygon and Shiba Inu, Uniswap (UNI) also has the majority of its supply in the control of the top 10 addresses, with 50.8% sitting in their balance. Pepe (PEPE) is also not far from such a situation with the metric being at 46.1%.

Naturally, centralization of wealth isn’t a positive for any cryptocurrency, as not only can holdings represent influence on the market, but some protocols outright give preference to those with more holdings in terms of decision-making and network consensus.

The biggest cryptocurrency where holdings are relevant in this manner is Ethereum (ETH), where its proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism means that the stakers or validators with a larger stake have a higher chance of getting to the add the next block and thus, better odds at receiving rewards.

Currently, Ethereum is fifth on this list with 44% of the supply under the control of the top 10 whales. As such, the second-largest coin by market cap is also not in the best spot in terms of this metric.

Among the assets listed in the chart, USD Coin (USDC) and Dai (DAI) are on the opposite end of the spectrum with the indicator sitting at 19% and 24.5%, respectively.

Polygon, Shiba Inu, and others that have a high degree of centralization may have risks of instability, while those that have only a modest part of the supply in the hands of the mega whales could be safer investments, at least in theory.

SHIB Price

At the time of writing, Shiba Inu is trading around $0.0000141, down almost 2% over the past day.