Moonstream Report: 80% of Ethereum NFTs Owned By Crypto Whales

By Shiela Bertillo

In a recent study conducted by Moonstream, an open-source blockchain analytics platform, it was found that the top non-fungible token (NFT) holders on Ethereum own most of the available NFTs on the blockchain.

The study was released last Friday, October 22, and it analyzed 7,020,950 NFT transactions on Ethereum between April 1, 2021 and September 25, 2021, constructed purely from on-chain data.

Accordingly, the analysis revealed that crypto whales, such as NFT platforms and exchanges, which make up the top 16.71% of all addresses, own 80.98% of NFTs on the blockchain. On the other hand, the remaining 19.02% of NFTs were distributed amongst 83.29% of NFT owners. 

Moonstream stated that in this study they scanned all blocks between block number 12, 150,245 and 13, 296,011. 

“Our scan of these 1,145,767 blocks yielded transfer activity for 7,020,950 tokens from 9,292 NFT contracts across 727,102 addresses. These mints and transfers form the core of the dataset.” they noted. (Read More: Philippines’ First Story Book NFT: The Last Moon by Yvette Tan is Set to Release Today)

Despite the NFT distribution reports showing how the whales occupy the space, Moonstream still encourages small investors to participate. 

The analytics platform noted that this data shows “that the Ethereum NFT market is open in the sense the vast majority of its participants are small-time purchasers who likely make their purchases manually” but they also said that there are still a few barriers for those “who wish to participate in this market.”

“There is also a great inequality in the Ethereum NFT market in the sense that the top 16.71% of NFT owners control 80.98% of the NFTs. This latter statistic does require a little more nuance in its interpretation, however, as many of those owners are marketplaces and clearinghouses like OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, and other platforms of the same ilk. We plan to expand on this analysis in a future report.” Moonstream added.

This article is published on BitPinas: Moonstream Report: 80% of Ethereum NFTs Owned By Crypto Whales