55% of Ethereum is concentrated in two crypto-exchanges
Nansen conducted a study showing that 55% of all Ethereum cryptocurrency is held in accounts on the Coinbase and Binance exchanges. Coinbase vaults hold 35% of the coins, while Binance holds 20%. Other cryptocurrency exchanges have significantly less Ethereum than the market leaders. For example, Kraken holds about 7.9% of this type of cryptocurrency and Bitfinex holds about 7.3%. The Gemini exchange holds 4.7% of Ethereum, and OKX holds just over 5%. A total of 25 million coins are stored on crypto exchanges, with 8.7 million ETH stored on Coinbase and about 4.9 million ETH stored on Binance.
In September 2022, the Ethereum ecosystem conducted a software update called Merge. This process consisted of switching to a different consensus algorithm. It increased the number of holders with small amounts of coins. The main purpose of the update was to optimize energy consumption while increasing efficiency.
However, the introduction of Merge had a downside – it eliminated the need to use miners as a tool to protect the network. As a result, many of them switched to other blockchains in the hope of generating high returns. Despite the fact that Ethereum surpassed even bitcoin in terms of profitability in 2022, some miners still switched to other ecosystems. According to Forbes, the most popular are Ergo and Ravencoin, which have a good ratio of mining conditions and income generation. After users switched from Ethereum, the hash rates of these coins increased by 98% and 146%, respectively.
However, the surge of activity in other ecosystems was short-lived – already at the beginning of 2023, the number of Ethereum domain names reached the mark of 2.2 million. This dynamic suggests that the number of users will continue to grow.
The domain service offered by the Ethereum blockchain has name protection through the use of smart contracts. In addition, these domains also act as NFTs and can be sold on special platforms.
The fact that the Ethereum ecosystem is growing in popularity every year is evidenced by the increase in social media pages with the .eth extension. For example, one of the founders of the Reddit platform, and the directors of Coinbase and Shopify have such extensions to their names. The extension is also popular among celebrities; it is on the account of Snoop Dogg and Anthony Hopkins.
The record period of growth of new domains was September 2022, when 437 thousand registrations were recorded. After the merge update, the dynamics decreased.
