According to the open-source blockchain analytics platform Moonstream, the top non-fungible token (NFT) holders on Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) owned most of the available NFTs on the blockchain.

What Happened: The analysis was conducted on more than seven million NFT transactions on the Ethereum blockchain between April 1 and September 25, 2021.

The report found that whales, NFT platforms, and exchanges, which comprise the top 16.71% of all addresses, own 80.98% of NFTs on Ethereum. 

 “This latter statistic does require a little more nuance in its interpretation, however, as many of those owners are marketplaces and clearinghouses like OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, and other platforms of the same ilk,” Moonstream said.

The remaining 19.02% of NFTs were distributed amongst 83.29% of NFT owners. 

Why It Matters: This trend seems to be following the Pareto Principle, which is the 80/20 rule. This is a common factor across various markets. 

Moonstream’s data set focuses on ERC 721 tokens and does not include any data from layer two networks such as Polygon, nor does it source data from centralized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

The report says, “Our scan of these 1,145,767 blocks yielded transfer activity for 7,020,950 tokens from 9,292 Ethereum NFT contracts across 727,102 addresses. These mints and transfers form the core of the dataset.”

While it reflects the NFT distribution pattern, the Moonstream report suggests that small investors still have room for participation.

The report reads, “What this data shows us is that the Ethereum NFT market is open in the sense the vast majority of its participants are small-time purchasers who likely make their purchases manually. There are few barriers to entry for those who wish to participate in this market.”
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