Data Revealed: Who Holds the SOL?

Original author: Ignas, Decentralized Finance researcher

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Translator | CryptoLeo (@LeoAndCrypto)

Just now, DeFi researcher Ignas wrote an analysis of the distribution of SOL tokens, including the SOL that is staked, the data of SOL locked in staking, and the proportion of SOL held in wallets. Odaily Planet Daily has compiled it as follows:

Last year, I wrote about the distribution of ETH, and Eekeyguy created a great public dashboard to check where ETH is stored. Now it's SOL's turn.

Data shows: 88% of the SOL supply is in circulation, approximately 538.17 million coins.

It is important to note that Solana has no upper limit on its total supply (like ETH), the inflation rate is 4.395%, the annual deflation rate is 15%, and the final inflation rate is expected to stabilize at 1.5%.

Solscan data shows that 71% of the circulating supply of SOL is being staked. (while ETH is at 30%.)

Solanacompass data shows that 6.7% of SOL is being locked for staking, or is the behavior of venture capitalists/teams/insiders, but I can't figure out who the specific holders of this portion of SOL are.

According to Messari data, 99.88% of SOL unlock has been completed. Currently, there are only 600,000 SOL tokens that are "locked," held by FTX (or have been sold in over-the-counter transactions).

So, what exactly are the 11.2% locked SOL tokens reported by Solanacompass and CMC?

Institutional SOL holders

According to Arkham Intelligence data, Coinbase holds $5 billion worth of SOL, accounting for 4.7% of the total supply of SOL.

In addition, some institutions also hold a large amount of SOL, the data is as follows:

• Binance - 3.97%
• Jito - 1.61%
• Upbit - 1.28%
• OKX - 1.19%
• Alameda - 0.92% ( or the partially locked tokens mentioned by Messari )
• Marinade Finance - 0.79%
• Robinhood - 0.74%
• Kraken - 0.53%
• Bybi - 0.49%
• Jump Crypto - 0.33%
• Crypto com - 0.33%
• Wintermute - 0.14%
• Bitstamp - 0.13%

In summary, Arkham can trace 20% of the circulating supply data of SOL. Additionally, we can discover more SOL holding and staking entities through the data platform Dune.

The above chart shows that, in addition to Binance and Coinbase mentioned earlier, Helius also holds 3.7% of the active staking supply. Additionally, Galaxy has 8 million staked SOL delegated, along with Ledger, Figment, Kiln 1, Everstake, etc. However, many wallets in the top 15 are marked. Surprisingly, only 6.6% of SOL comes from liquid staking tokens (LST), which limits the growth potential of Decentralized Finance; if the native staking ratio of SOL were to be slightly higher, with all staking coming from LST, the Solana DeFi ecosystem could potentially grow by billions of dollars.

independent SOL holders

In the following text, I will use AI to calculate the data of SOL holders. * (There may be errors, and the data is not completely accurate.) *

According to data derived from AI, there are as many as 120 wallets holding more than 1 million SOL, with a total holding of over 150 million SOL.

The number of wallets holding less than 1000 SOL exceeds 8.9 million;

On average, each wallet holds 16.8 SOL (leaning towards a smaller number of holders).

Overall,

Concentration: 0.33% of wallets (30,220) control 54% of the SOL supply (but this includes CEXs, custodians, etc.);

Retail dominance: 97.4% of wallets hold less than 1000 SOL, accounting for 24.8% of the supply.

Disclaimer: This article is still being updated, and comments are welcome to provide new data regarding the status of SOL and its ownership.