Wealth Inequality in Cryptocurrencies

Jeremy Neiman
May 5, 2021

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Chart shows the % of coins held by different percentiles of holders for four cryptocurrencies. For example, about 85% of bitcoin is held by the top 1% of bitcoin addresses. The most inequal of the four looked at is Dogecoin, with almost 94% of DOGE held by the top 1%. Includes American and World wealth distributions for reference.

Sources and Caveats

Data is compiled in this spreadsheet.

Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin come from https://bitinfocharts.com/. Numbers are approximate as their data is not broken down by percentile.

Ethereum data comes from BigQuery and is processed by this notebook. Only includes non-contract addresses.

Crypto data includes the “institutional” addresses such as exchanges. For example, the top Ethereum address is one of Binance’s, meaning that it isn’t all owned by one entity (although some might argue about that.)

American data comes from The Federal Reserve’s website.

World data comes from The World Inequality Database.

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Jeremy Neiman

Coder of random things. Software engineer and data scientist. All views are my own. http://jeremyneiman.com