New on-chain research from Arkham Intelligence this week shows that the wallet address currently holding the most ETH ($3,393.74) is not an individual, not an exchange, not an ETF issuer, but the staking contract that secures Ethereum.
According to Arkham, the ETH2 Beacon Deposit Contract currently holds more than 72.4 million ETH, worth approximately $252 billion at current market prices, and represents approximately 60% of the total supply.
The power center of Ethereum
In terms of individuals, the research firm confirmed that the largest known individual holder of ETH is still Rain Lohmus, the founder of the Estonian bank LHV, who bought 250,000 ETH for around $75,000 in the 2014 presale. Those coins would now be worth about $871 million, but Lohmus doesn’t have access to them because he lost the private keys years ago.
The second largest identifiable individual holder is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who currently owns approximately 240,000 ETH, worth approximately $840 million.
In addition to individual wallets, centralized exchanges and institutional entities collectively control some of the largest pools of ether. For example, Binance owns about 4.09 million ETH, while asset manager BlackRock owns about 3.94 million ETH, largely associated with its iShares Ethereum Trust ETF. Coinbase is the second largest institutional holder, with approximately 3.5 million ETH across multiple addresses, including cold wallets and staking reserves for its cbETH stake token.
The next example is Upbit, Robinhood, Kraken, OKX and Bitfinex, which are among the top institutional holders.
Seized Funds, Stolen Funds and Layer-2 Bridges
Arkham discovered that governments also appear on the scoreboard. For example, the US government controls approximately 60,000 ETH, which consists largely of seized criminal funds, including from the Potapenko/Turogin case and from seizures related to the Bitfinex hacker.
Several high-profile hacker wallets are still among the major holders, including the wallet controlled by the Gatecoin operator, which still contains over 156,000 ETH stolen in 2016. On the infrastructure side, the Wrapped Ether (WETH ($3,388.84)) contract contains over 2.2 million ETH, representing the supply of WETH minted to make ETH compatible with the ERC-20 standards.
The dataset shows that native Layer 2 bridges are also responsible for a significant amount of locked ETH, including 833,000 ETH deposited in Arbitrum’s own bridge and approximately 723,000 ETH deposited in Base’s bridge. Overall, the latest on-chain data identifies staking contracts, exchanges, ETF issuers, bridges, and custody platforms as the largest known entities currently owning Ether.
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