One of the most interesting aspects of blockchain is that everything is public. All transactions, wallets and portfolios are entirely accessible to anyone, allowing for an unprecedented amount of insight into a financial asset class.
The uses of the data can range from monitoring overall trading activity and flows to seeing what the largest wallets and firms are doing with their positions. Arkham Intelligence is a blockchain analytics platform particularly interested in the second application. It cross-references financial disclosures by firms and individuals with on-chain activity to match up entities with specific wallet addresses.
With Arkham’s insights, anyone can see how the largest entities in crypto are trading. One interesting application is looking at the largest firms in the space.
Coinbase, one of the largest crypto companies in the world, operates a centralized exchange, wallet service and a layer-2 called Base. Coinbase’s portfolio is worth nearly $80 billion. The wallet is composed almost entirely of Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC). The firm holds over 900,000 BTC, currently worth over $55 billion. It also holds over 6.6 million ETH worth roughly $20 billion.
While Coinbase operates as a crypto custodian, Grayscale is a crypto asset manager. It creates a handful of funds and ETFs that allow investors to access crypto products. In January, it was one of the first companies to offer a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) converted from a previously released futures ETF. Grayscale’s portfolio has more than 99% of its value in ETH and BTC. It owns 303,050 BTC worth $18.6 billion and 2.98 million ETH worth $9 billion. Grayscale holds $27.6 billion in crypto assets.
While it is mostly known for its equity platform, Robinhood began offering crypto several years ago. The crypto platform offers a handful of the most popular tokens, but the portfolio is mostly invested in ETH, BTC and Shiba Inu (SHIB). The wallet has 140,000 BTC worth $8.6 billion, 1.5 million ETH worth $4.7 billion and 42.5 trillion SHIB worth $1 billion.
As the largest crypto exchange in the world, it is no surprise that Binance (BNB) has the largest portfolio, worth over $200 billion. It holds 165 million BNB worth $94 billion, 640,000 BTC worth $40 billion, $27.2 billion worth of Tether (USDT) and 4.4 million ETH worth $13.2 billion.
Coinbase has the largest ETH holding on the list. Its $20 billion of ETH is more than 5% of the total supply. The four firms hold a combined 15.5 million ETH, which is roughly 12.7% of the supply.
While this may make it seem like the supply of ETH is heavily concentrated among a few entities, Coinbase, Robinhood and Binance hold assets for their customers. The portion of the supply held by these firms is under the discretion of the millions of people who hold ETH on these brokerages.
