Where is SOL hidden?
Disclaimer: This article is still being refined. I need everyone's help to verify the data and provide new information about the current status of SOL and its ownership.
88% of the total supply of SOL is in circulation.
There is no cap on the total supply of Solana, the current inflation rate is 4.395%, decreasing by 15% each year. The final inflation rate is expected to stabilize at 1.5%.
Notably, 71% of the circulating supply of SOL is actively staked, while this ratio for ETH is 30%.
However, according to data from Solanacompass.com, 6.7% of this staked amount is locked SOL (VCs, insiders, team holdings)?
However, I'm struggling to figure out what these locked tokens are and who owns them.
According to Messari data, 99.88% of SOL tokens have been unlocked. The only 'locked' tokens are the 600,000 SOL held by FTX (which may have been sold through over-the-counter trades).
So, what are the 11.2% of locked tokens reported by Solanacompass and CoinMarketCap? It's currently unclear.
Who holds SOL?
According to Arkham Intelligence data, Coinbase holds $5 billion worth of SOL, accounting for 4.7% of the total supply of SOL.
Here are other major holders sorted by circulating supply percentage:
Binance — 3.97%
Jito — 1.61%
Upbit — 1.28%
OKx — 1.19%
Alameda — 0.92% (possibly belongs to locked tokens marked by Messari?)
Marinade Finance — 0.79%
Robinhood — 0.74%
Kraken — 0.53%
Bybit — 0.49%
Jump Crypto — 0.33%
Crypto.com — 0.33%
Wintermute — 0.14%
Bitstamp — 0.13%
Overall, the top holders accounted for over 20% of the circulating supply as per Arkham's statistics, which is a decent figure.
We can also find more related institutions by querying staking entities on Dune.
In addition to the institutions mentioned above (Binance, Coinbase), we also see Helius holding 2.5% of the active staked supply.
Galaxy also holds a significant amount of SOL, totaling 8.8 million, in addition to institutions like Ledger, Figment, Kiln1, Everstake, etc.
Many top-ranking wallets have yet to be tagged for ownership.
To achieve decentralization of the network, the Solana Foundation has delegated 35.6 million SOL (6.6% of the circulating supply) to 542 validators.
According to @0xEekeyguy, validators need to stake at least 50,000 to 75,000 SOL to be profitable.
Surprisingly, only 14.3% of staked SOL comes from liquid staking tokens (LST) (accounting for 10.5% of circulating supply). Jito is leading in this area.
This limits the growth potential of DeFi on Solana. If a few percentage points of native staked SOL were to shift to LST, the scale of Solana's DeFi ecosystem could increase by billions of dollars.
Individual Holder
Disclaimer: I attempted to estimate the number of individual holders by analyzing data with artificial intelligence, which may not be accurate.
According to this experimental data, the amount of SOL held by 120 wallets is equivalent to the total holdings of 8.9 million users holding less than 1,000 SOL.
The average balance of SOL wallets is: 16.8 SOL (affected by small holders, data may be skewed).
Overall:
Concentration: 0.33% of wallets (30,220) control 54% of SOL supply (but this includes centralized exchanges, custodians, etc.).
Retail Dominance: 97.4% of wallets hold less than 1,000 SOL, collectively holding 24.8% of the supply.
I need fans, you need references. Guessing is not as good as following.
Currently, it's a bull market, and opportunities arise every day with password sharing.
