Cryptocurrency analysis company Arkham has released an analysis of the largest Ethereum holders and the stories behind them.
The platform's list also includes exchanges, active whales, and even a permanently destroyed wallet.
In the top two spots are Binance and Grayscale, two of the most prominent participants in the crypto space. Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, stores most of its ETH in just two cold wallets that currently hold over $5.7 billion in ETH.
Grayscale, the largest digital asset manager, holds approximately $5 billion of ETH held in more than 650 addresses owned by Ethereum Trusts, with no single address holding more than $30 million.
Another intriguing whale, access to the 15th largest cryptocurrency wallet is completely gone, and this wallet is known as a Polkadot multisig wallet. The wallet contains 306,000 ETH tokens.
Among the 30 largest ETH addresses are two wallets that still hold the ETH they bought from the Ethereum pre-sale. The pre-sale was an event that took place in July 2014 prior to the launch of Ethereum, where early backers could purchase ETH at a discounted price.
One of these wallets is 0x2B6, which is the 22nd largest ETH wallet on the Genesis block, receiving 250 thousand ETH. This wallet has never been touched since. It is not known whether the wallet in question is a “hodler” or a lost wallet.
The other is 0x9e8, which is the 28th largest ETH wallet on the Genesis block, receiving 200 thousand ETH. This wallet has only made one transaction since it was first created, sending 10,000 ETH to Kraken in August of 2015.
*Not investment advice.