The figures of a study carried out by the well-known cryptocurrency analysis firm Chainalysis show that 1,600 wallets protect more than a third of all the bitcoins available so far, according to the English media The Express.
The 1,600 portfolios mentioned above have deposited more than 1,000 BTC each, and 100 of them contain more than 10,000 BTC, approximately US $ 75 million, the portal reports.
Phillip Gladwell, chief economist at Chainalysis, said:
"This concentration of wealth means that Bitcoin is at risk of volatility, since the movements of a small number of people will have a big effect on prices."
However, a more detailed analysis shows that some of these "whales" have not moved their Bitcoin in a long time, causing some to think that the wallets belong to individuals who for some reason have lost access to the funds. A similar situation may be happening with the more than one million BTC stored by Nakamoto himself.
Part of the findings made by Chainalysis indicate that the amount of Bitcoin held by long-term holders has been decreasing, compared to the amounts held by short-term holders. This means that the power of market movement has been concentrated towards the speculators, properly speaking.
Bitcoin is not the only crypto affected by this. The least believers in the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies have voiced their criticisms of a variety of different projects for presenting a similar situation, in which a small number of wallets store a considerable amount of cryptocurrencies.
An analysis carried out by Reddit users shows that the 10 main EOS portfolios protect almost half of all those currencies, a total of 496,735,539 according to the calculations made by the redditors.
It is important to keep in mind that some of these addresses may belong to cryptocurrency trading platforms, which reduces the risk of a centralization problem.
But the numbers point to another direction: a more detailed analysis found that the 75 largest EOS holders have at least US $ 10 million in coins, totaling 646,595, leaving little chance that all these accounts are attributed to exchanges. .
The issue has become a controversial issue for many in the cryptocurrency community, and some even dare to claim that Block.one's attempts to mitigate this form of centralization have not been effective. It is still not clear how far this problem can spread with respect to EOS, but surely the recent start-up of its mainnet will shed more light on the case.
Litecoin, another of the most popular alternative cryptocurrencies, has also had problems in this regard, detecting that a little more than 50% of all circulating coins are withheld in just 400 wallets.
Despite this, many analysts believe that, as adoption grows in this industry, all cryptocurrencies will begin to be distributed through an increasing number of wallets. While we wait for that to happen, the concern in the head of many, where the so-called "whales" use their currencies to manipulate the market, taking prices where they want, will remain present.