Who Owns the Most Ethereum (2024 Edition)

INTRODUCTION

Ethereum pre-sale investor Rain Lohmus owns the most ETH among all individual holders, with 250K ETH (>$660M) held in a wallet that is inaccessible to him. Ethereum Cofounder Vitalik Buterin is the next largest individual holder with 245K ETH ($650M) - he still has access to his holdings. The ETH2 Beacon Deposit Contract currently holds the most ETH of any wallet address, with over 38M ETH (>$100B) in deposits at the time of writing. This represents the total amount of ETH that has been deposited to be staked to help secure the network.

In this article, we will look into who owns the most Ethereum using Arkham’s ETH token page.

SUMMARY

• >30% of the total ETH supply is stored in the ETH2 Deposit Contract, the address used to store validator stake deposits. 
• Rain Lohmus is the largest individual ETH holder with 250K ETH, however, he has lost access to the private keys which control his wallet.
• Vitalik Buterin is the largest individual ETH holder with access to his wallet (245 ETH). 
• Exchanges constitute 60% of the top 20 addresses holding ETH.
• The US government is a major holder with 56K ETH seized from the Bitfinex hacker. 
• A number of wallets which have been publicly tagged to celebrities hold significant amounts of ETH, including Donald Trump, Mark Cuban, Justin Bieber and more. 

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Note Many of the addresses here have been grouped by entity, which simply means that any addresses belonging to the same entity (i.e. Coinbase) have been aggregated into one for the sake of simplicity. Additionally, Arkham’s AI entity prediction feature believes the 16th largest holder is Bitfinex, however, this is a lower confidence prediction and may not necessarily be correct. 

The below chart categorizes the top 20 ETH holders by entity type:

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With this in mind, we can now look more closely at who holds the most Ethereum by entity type. 

EXCHANGES

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Exchanges are the largest institutional holders of ETH today, making up 12 of the top 20 ETH holders on our list. Given ETH is the 2nd largest cryptocurrency by market cap, nearly all exchanges offering crypto trading services offer ETH trading. These exchanges need to hold significant amounts of ETH to enable market-making for seamless user trading, maintain sufficient liquidity to support user deposits and withdrawals, as well as provide staking services for users to enable ETH holders to earn additional yield on their assets. 

• Coinbase holds the largest amount of ETH among exchanges with 6.9M ETH, worth over $18B. This is a cumulative sum of ETH held across all of Coinbase’s associated addresses, including cold storage and staking for cbETH.
• Binance holds the second-largest amount of ETH among exchanges with 4.5M ETH, nearly $12B worth today. Similar to Coinbase, Binance has its own ETH staking service, which is accounted for in the total amount of ETH held in addition to cold storage wallets. 
• Kraken holds the third-most ETH among exchanges, with 1.7M ETH. Kraken also offers staking services which are accounted for in its total holdings, though it is worth noting Kraken shut down support for these services earlier last year after regulatory scrutiny, which has impacted their total holdings.

PUBLIC GOODS

Public goods addresses are those used to support key components of the Ethereum network, most notably the smart contract for staking deposits. Reasons for holding ETH vary among public goods on a case-by-case basis, but the main takeaway is that these addresses pool assets belonging to others and are effectively not controlled by a single entity.

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The ETH2 Beacon Deposit Contract, which is the address used to store and process staking deposits, holds the greatest amount of ETH among all addresses - over 38M ETH roughly equivalent to $101B today. This tells us over 30% of total ETH supply at the time being deposited to be staked.

The Wrapped Ether (WETH) Contract  holds over 3M ETH, worth over $8B today. This is the address used to mint WETH - a token pegged to the value of ETH but with extensible functionality and support across various blockchains. Unlike native ETH which does not actually follow the ERC-20 token standard on the Ethereum network, WETH can be used across different applications and on different blockchains. The total amount of ETH held by this address represents the amount of WETH that has been minted.

FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Financial institutions provide various services to clients, including the buying and selling of ETH, staking services, and more.

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Grayscale, which holds just short of 3M ETH, is a digital asset investment firm which provides investment trusts that actively track the price of various crypto assets, like ETH. Grayscale currently offers the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) - for which Grayscale buys and holds ETH, and which investors can then purchase fractionalized shares of through the trust. Grayscale’s total holdings are worth over $7.7B at the time of writing. 

Paxos, which holds 404K ETH worth roughly $1B today, is a regulated financial institution which offers a variety of blockchain-related services and infrastructure for enterprise customers. Paxos provides various services for ETH, such as buying and selling, as well as staking. Additionally, Paxos issues $USDP, a stablecoin which uses the ERC-20 standard and therefore requires ETH for gas fees to be transferred anywhere.

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OTHER BLOCKCHAINS

Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup, a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum which executes transactions in a separate environment to then settle back to Ethereum. In short, rollups like Arbitrum help with network congestion on Ethereum, and provide users with lower fees and faster transaction execution.

When users wish to use a rollup like Arbitrum, they first need to transfer, or bridge over, assets from Ethereum, like ETH, that they wish to trade on Arbitrum. Rollups have native bridges, which are usually run by and secured by the core team or foundation of the blockchain itself. 

While there are several third-party bridges that users can choose from, a number of these bridges have notoriously been hacked before and have resulted in as much as hundreds of millions of dollars lost, making native bridges safer at the cost of speed and delivery. 

The actual process is done by depositing the equivalent amount of assets a user wishes to use (i.e. 1 ETH) into the Arbitrum deposit contract, which stores that ETH and returns a wrapped version of ETH equivalent to the deposited amount that can be used on Arbitrum, formally known as ‘bridging’. Therefore, the amount of ETH stored in a blockchain’s native bridge can be used as a rough estimate of user adoption for that particular chain.

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As of today, roughly 1.5M ETH has been deposited in the Arbitrum native bridge.

Optimism, another optimistic rollup, has 367K ETH deposited to its native ‘Gateway’ bridge. 

Another name in our subset of blockchain infrastructure addresses holding ETH is Polkadot. Note that Polkadot is not a blockchain itself, but rather a network standard which supports communication between other blockchains called parachains. The Polkadot Multi-sig wallet holds 306K ETH at the time of writing.

GOVERNMENTS

Arkham has been able to identify government owned addresses which hold crypto in an on-chain address. These are seized funds from criminal activities, e.g. Silk Road. Though not included in our list of top holders, the US government holds 56.086k ETH, the second-most among all of its held assets. Most of the US government’s known ETH holdings are seized funds and have come from the Bitfinex Hacker. 

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STOLEN FUNDS

Some of the largest ETH holders are hackers who acquired their ETH by exploiting vulnerabilities in exchanges and on-chain protocols to drain their funds. The largest ETH balance in stolen funds belongs to the Gatecoin Hacker, whose address currently holds 156.2K ETH which was obtained in one of the largest exploits in crypto history back in 2016 which saw $2M of losses in user funds.

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The FTX Hacker currently holds 95.7K ETH, which was stolen in a a SIM-swap attack which saw $400m in total losses in November 2022.

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The BNB Bridge Hacker holds 1.5K ETH and 39K WSTETH in an attack which saw over $550M withdrawn.

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Arkham’s Visualizer tool provides an intuitive interface for investors and analysts to observe the flow of funds associated with a particular contract or address using on-chain data. As we can observe in the screenshots above, hackers often attempt to cash out by dispersing stolen funds across a variety of different exchanges, applications, and mixers such as Tornado Cash. 

ETH FOUNDERS AND PRE-SALE INVESTORS

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Rain Lohmus owns the most ETH - with 250K in his stash. However, this is inaccessible to him as he lost the private keys to his wallet and cannot access his ETH. He paid $75K for this in the ETH presale in 2014 - at current prices, this represents a >9000% gain in under 10 years.

The largest individual holder of ETH is co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who holds 245.8K ETH. We examine Vitalik’s net worth in greater detail in this report.

Jeffrey Wilcke is another Cofounder of Ethereum and is known to hold 136K ETH at the time of writing.

CELEBRITIES

Several celebrities hold ETH in wallets which have been publicly tagged on Arkham. 

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Donald Trump holds the most ETH among celebrities tracked on Arkham, with a total of 703 ETH worth $1M today, a sum of 340 ETH and 362 WETH., all of which is attributed to proceeds from the Trump NFT collection.

Other celebrities holding ETH include DJ Steve Aoki (158 ETH), Justin Bieber (146 ETH),  Mark Cuban (59 ETH) and Neymar Jr. (45 ETH). These celebrities likely acquired ETH from promotional activities in crypto during the 2021 bull run.

CONCLUSION

Ethereum’s vision is to be a global, decentralized platform for money and new kinds of applications. ETH provides a critical economic function to the security of the Ethereum network by incentivizing validators to continue to verify and process user transactions. Additionally, ETH has become a critical component for the liquidity of the Ethereum ecosystem, empowering DeFi apps, NFTs, and beyond.

Unlike BTC, which has a hard-capped 21 million supply, ETH does not have a maximum supply. Instead, Ethereum implemented a mechanism which eliminates, or “burns”, a portion of ETH used in gas fees. This way, when the network sees more activity, ETH becomes deflationary by design.

In this article, we looked at who owns the most ETH today. While the ETH native staking contract holds significantly more ETH than any other address, exchanges collectively hold the most ETH. We observed that the native bridges of the top 2 Ethereum rollups today (Arbitrum and Optimism) are among the top 20 holders of ETH (9th-largest and 14th-largest respectively), indicating slow but steady success in the development of Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap.

We observed that several celebrities hold ETH, including Donald Trump and Justin Bieber. And though Vitalik Buterin is the largest active individual holder of ETH today, this is only because Rain Lohmus, who bought 250K ETH for $75K in the ETH presale, lost access to his private keys.