How concentrated is Hive?
All blockchains have the problem of a "fair" distribution. Some will always have more than others, and this generally isn't a problem as long as there is not a small minority that holds too way too much stake. Numbers are obviously quite subjective at this point. If one user had 10% of the supply, would that be too much? What about 5% or 1% or even 0.1%? Subjectively it feels to me like everything above 1% is starting to be a problem for the network. So what about Hive? We can see the largest holders of Hive (Power) here:
These are very big numbers, no doubt. The largest account is holding over 13M Hive Power (!) and then quite rapidly decreases to around 1M at place 20. We quickly see that some these accounts are holding massive amounts of liquid Hive as well. But this is essentially limited to only 2 accounts that hold another 2-3M Hive.
So how much % is that in terms of the total Hive Power share?
When we look at the statistics that @dalz summarizes we can see some great charts that give us more insight. For example, we can see that Hive has a bit more than 400M coins as its total supply (without HBD).
And we also see that around half of that is powered up, while the other half is liquid on chain or on exchanges.
If we assume that there is around 160M Hive powered up, then we can calculate the share of what the above mentioned whales have of that.
| 1 | @freedom | 9.8% (+liquid Hive) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | @blocktrades | 7.3% |
| 3 | @alpha | 4.8% |
| 4 | @darthknight | 4.3% (+liquid Hive) |
| 5 | @theycallmedan | 2.3% |
| 6 | @blocktrades.com | 1.9% |
| 7 | @steemmonsters | 1.7% |
| 8 | @mika | 1.3% |
| 9 | @rancheloraxo | 1.2% |
| 10 | @adm | 1.1% |
That ain't looking too great: the largest account is holding almost 10% of the total HP out there... We then have blocktrades who is holding 7.3%+1.9% = 9.2%. The share then drops almost 50% where we have alpha with just under 5%. The share then continues to drop quite quickly and is at around 1% for place #10.
But of course this only tells the picture for Hive Power. For some reason I cannot get the website to load only Hive balances in descending order (if you know how to do that please let me know). But we know that of the around 200M liquid Hive most of it is on exchanges. However, we do not have any idea how concentrated Hive is off the chain. My guess is that with over 100M on Upbit alone, there will be some very big whales there.
Conclusion
This is only part of what I wanted to explorer; there is still so much to look into, especially when it comes to what these big accounts are doing with their Hive (power). I am planning on focusing on that tomorrow. For now, we can see that Hive is unfortunately not very well distributed. There are essentially only 4 people owning almost 30% of H(P). Ups! But then again, while this is not good by any means, we have to add context. Who are these accounts and what are they doing with Hive? Hopefully, tomorrow we'll know more.
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