How concentrated is Hive?
All blockchains have the problem of a "fair" distribution. Some will always have more than others, and this generally isn't a problem as long as there is not a small minority that holds too way too much stake. Numbers are obviously quite subjective at this point. If one user had 10% of the supply, would that be too much? What about 5% or 1% or even 0.1%? Subjectively it feels to me like everything above 1% is starting to be a problem for the network. So what about Hive? We can see the largest holders of Hive (Power) here:
These are very big numbers, no doubt. The largest account is holding over 13M Hive Power (!) and then quite rapidly decreases to around 1M at place 20. We quickly see that some these accounts are holding massive amounts of liquid Hive as well. But this is essentially limited to only 2 accounts that hold another 2-3M Hive.
So how much % is that in terms of the total Hive Power share?
When we look at the statistics that @dalz summarizes we can see some great charts that give us more insight. For example, we can see that Hive has a bit more than 400M coins as its total supply (without HBD).
And we also see that around half of that is powered up, while the other half is liquid on chain or on exchanges.
If we assume that there is around 160M Hive powered up, then we can calculate the share of what the above mentioned whales have of that.
| 1 | @freedom | 9.8% (+liquid Hive) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | @blocktrades | 7.3% |
| 3 | @alpha | 4.8% |
| 4 | @darthknight | 4.3% (+liquid Hive) |
| 5 | @theycallmedan | 2.3% |
| 6 | @blocktrades.com | 1.9% |
| 7 | @steemmonsters | 1.7% |
| 8 | @mika | 1.3% |
| 9 | @rancheloraxo | 1.2% |
| 10 | @adm | 1.1% |
That ain't looking too great: the largest account is holding almost 10% of the total HP out there... We then have blocktrades who is holding 7.3%+1.9% = 9.2%. The share then drops almost 50% where we have alpha with just under 5%. The share then continues to drop quite quickly and is at around 1% for place #10.
But of course this only tells the picture for Hive Power. For some reason I cannot get the website to load only Hive balances in descending order (if you know how to do that please let me know). But we know that of the around 200M liquid Hive most of it is on exchanges. However, we do not have any idea how concentrated Hive is off the chain. My guess is that with over 100M on Upbit alone, there will be some very big whales there.
Conclusion
This is only part of what I wanted to explorer; there is still so much to look into, especially when it comes to what these big accounts are doing with their Hive (power). I am planning on focusing on that tomorrow. For now, we can see that Hive is unfortunately not very well distributed. There are essentially only 4 people owning almost 30% of H(P). Ups! But then again, while this is not good by any means, we have to add context. Who are these accounts and what are they doing with Hive? Hopefully, tomorrow we'll know more.
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I been looking into all this for few weeks and can't really understand the exactly methood, i been checking the blocktrades around and the tribaldex page, hopefully i get into this more before too late. Thanks for sharing ur point of view
wow didnt know that until I saw your post.
Great post, thanks for info. Looking forward to your post tomorrow :)
interesting post and important conclusions
now, what to do about it?
we can't really do much about it. The good news is that the owners are mainly just holding Hive and not selling it. But there are some problems with governance and proposals
That logic doesn't track.
You want a better token distribution but you don't want the biggest holders to sell?
ha, you are right... that doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess what I meant was that these holders aren't dumping Hive on the market but are rather hodling it (which means that their accounts are growing at an immense rate in absolute terms)
Looking forward to see the findings of your research. The fact that so much Hive is liquid and used as a medium of exchange , shows that there is no need for HBD for transactions.
Hive and HBD are quite different. HBD is meant to be stable while Hive's value can be very volatile. To me it makes sense to have a stable coin for transactions, especially when one wants to send a fixed amount of value. The problem, however, is that a lot of that liquid Hive is probably in the hands of whales that are only interested in making profit. But then again, this is probably for every coin the case.
I can understand people may want to peg their value of Hive to something. But the practice shows that Liquid Hive is used far more than HBD for transacting. Probably if you include Swap.Hive, it makes HBD usage look insignificant.
These are interesting numbers but I think you're a little off on your conclusions. Firstly, if you're going to add in the liquid Hive these accounts have then you have to add in the liquid supply as well. You can't say the total HP is 160M and then add in liquid Hive to the HP. If you just add the HP then the total is 23.4%, not "almost 30%". In fact, it's less than 25%.
If you use your number of 400M total Hive, then the liquid Hive they hold is @5.4M of @240M liquid or 2.25%.
I'm just pointing out that the numbers aren't quite as extreme as you're painting them.
HP is the governance token of Hive and these 4, while large, don't even come close to the 50%+ needed to make changes to the blockchain. With 20 witnesses, there is still plenty of HP available to outvote anyone trying to make proposals hurtful to the blockchain. Factor in that blocktrades is one of the driving forces in the development on Hive and you could see their large stake as being a positive rather than a potential negative. I'm not familiar with what the others do but they are also probably pushing development behind the scenes as well.
Thanks for taking the time to put this together. It is important to stay aware of what is going on with the token supply. I just wanted to point out that the numbers, while substantial, are not quite as big as you are portraying them.
thanks for pointing this out. I included it with liquid Hive because they could convert their massive holdings with one click into HP. But true, it complicates things. I think my point actually is still very clear: Even taken only the HP, 4 people would still own around a quarter of total HP. It doesn't matter to me very much if it's a bit less than 30% or 23% - it shouldn't be anywhere close to these levels. It should be perhaps at around 1% or so... even 4% could be somewhat acceptable.
It's a huge deal if the concentration of a coin/token is so concentrated. Luckily for us, the people outlined here do not seem to dump Hive on the markets (with blocktrades being a core dev of course). More on this tomorrow.
The problem with Hive distribution has nothing to do with the richest holders and everything to do more people not piling into the party. It's very easy to get ahold of Hive. There is no shortage of supply... yet. If a billionaire wanted to get into the top 3 HP holders I don't think it would be that difficult. It would just take a couple months.
but is it healthy for a network to have a few that hold that much? Even if more people would buy and stake Hive, it's unlikely that concentration would change very much (since the top accounts hold such massive quantities). Most of the top accounts seem to be rather dormant and just accumulating, a mixed blessing imo.
bump for more views
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 45/75) Liquid rewards.
Just like when this project was built, many big investors came here and they are still here and they have supported this project a lot.
Well, the principle of the curators not willing to curate newbies, and/or low-powered community members contributes to the uneven distribution of Hive. I hope this won't pose a problem in future that will counter the concept of true decentralization.
Interestingly, nobody mentioned the fact that we have some whales that have multiple whale accounts...
Thanks for this interesting post... HIVE needs a few more years to be better distributed...
Freedom is a doorment account..
Sorta like in real life huh?
Blocktrades and Alpha are both Dan as far as I know and Marky was probably twice that much over all his accounts spread. Some goes for adm, that is azircon and he should be rocking a lot more too.
And then, after these whales, there are about 2000 Dolphins.
Only 2000.
Between 10M vests and 1M vests there are a lot of accounts.
Still, there are many, many more below 1M vests.
Further, several of the top accounts are used to trade into and out of HIVE.
Hello @tobetada! I'd have loved to see a link to your follow up post "What Are Hive's Whales Up To?" from back then edited in your original text.
I today came from your recent post "Hive's Top 20 HP Whales: What Are They Up To? (1/2)" and loved to see such a link there as well as soon as your next part two is published. Already looking forward to it. Cheers to you!