Despite a turbulent 2021 for the whole crypto industry, Cardano whales seem to be unmoved by it with a small number of the richest ADA holders controlling roughly 94% of the total circulating supply.
Data presented by Finbold shows that as of December 13 2021, the top 10% of Cardano whales hold over 31 billion ADA out of the 33.43 billion circulating coins, according to the data extracted from the on-chain analysis platform Coin Metrics.
Notably, the number of ADA within the top 10% of addresses has grown steadily since the year began. Starting at 30 billion in January, the number of ADA held by these addresses has gone up by over 1 billion, representing an increase of 3%.
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Whales accumulating rather than selling
Interestingly, the data from Coin Metrics shows that these top addresses are accumulating more ADA, which correlates with the rising development activity on the network. Furthermore, Cardano, Polkadot and Solana have all been ranked as the top 3 networks with the highest daily development activity as the year 2021 comes to an end, data from Santiment shows.
Indeed, Cardano has been working on a number of projects on its network such as the development of smart contracts and a DeFi ecosystem. There is a possibility that these changes may be the catalyst for increased confidence in the asset, which may be accountable for the rising number of ADA that the whales possess.
Meanwhile, an October report by digital asset manager Grayscale Investments titled ‘An introduction to Cardano’ says that Cardano is undervalued compared to the second largest cryptocurrency – Ethereum. The report came after ADA had reached an all-time high of over $3 in early September, starting at $0.178 in January.
The crypto community recently made a bet that Cardano’s price will rise by 80% to reach $2.4 by December 30, indicating the community has confidence that it will rise. Cardano has also recorded a higher on-chain activity with 2x higher transaction volume than Ethereum and also ranks as the second most active chain.
Few whales also controlling Bitcoin
Cardano has a small percentage of whales controlling most of its supply, but it is not the only cryptocurrency experiencing this. The number one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has top whales controlling even a higher percentage of its circulating supply. Finbold reported earlier this year that 99% of the Bitcoin’s circulating supply was held by just 10% of BTC wallets.
This has raised questions about Bitcoin’s decentralization claims, especially because the miners were also largely concentrated in China at the time. No such issue has been raised concerning Cardano for now even as its whale holdings are growing considerably.
