17% Of Addresses Bought 81% Of Ethereum NFTs Since April

Moonstream, an open-source blockchain analytics firm, published that the top 16.71% of all the nonfungible token holders on the Ethereum network owned around 80.98% of NFTs between April 1 and September 25.

This report was published on October 21. The analysis was conducted on over 7 million NFT transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The whales, exchanges, and NFT platforms that make up 16.71% of all the addresses, own 80.98% of the nonfungible tokens available on Ethereum.

The rest of the 83.29% of NFT owners could only acquire a handful of these tokens within the period that this survey was conducted. Moonstream said:

“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.”

All these figures appear to closely resemble the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule). That is a common factor across various markets and sectors. The Pareto Principle is based on the idea that nearly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.

One Reddit user “xddemonesque” posted in response to the report:

“Fascinating to see the Pareto principle more or less hold in a market as avant-garde and traditionally ‘irrational’.”

Moonstream’s Ethereum NFTs Survey Analysis

Moonstream’s data focuses mainly on ERC 721 tokens. But, it does not include any data from Layer 2 networks like Polygon. Also, it does not source data from centralized Application Programming Interface’s (APIs). That report reads:

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

The open-source blockchain analytics firm mentioned the “great inequality” of NFT ownership on Ethereum blockchain. Moonstream also insisted that the NFT market is still open to accommodate small investors. It stated that most of the NFT holders are small scale traders who acquired their assets with relative ease:

“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.”