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Top Ethereum holders double in size when tokens and stablecoins are included in on-chain valuations.
Ethereum’s balance sheet looks nothing like it did a few years ago.
A new on-chain analysis has revealed that 58% of the capital held by Ethereum’s largest addresses exists entirely outside of Ethereum (ETH) – in ERC-20 tokens and stablecoins that traditional leaderboards simply don’t capture.
When Ethereum addresses are ranked purely by ETH balance, the top 10,000 hold a total of $189 billion. Rank those same addresses by total assets – ETH plus ERC-20 tokens and stablecoins – and that figure jumps to $426 billion. The capital at the top of the Ethereum economy is more than twice as large as conventional rankings suggest.
The gap is not just a matter of numbers. It reveals a totally different distribution of major holders. Of the top 1,000 addresses, only 537 appear in both the ETH-only leaderboard and the aggregate leaderboard, meaning that nearly half of Ethereum’s largest holders are effectively invisible when the market looks at ETH balances alone.
The composition of these holdings tells its own story. ETH now only represents 42% of what the largest addresses hold. Stablecoins represent around 26%, with the remaining share distributed across ERC-20 tokens. A form of dominance shift has already occurred through a quiet accumulation of balance sheets between protocols and tokens, while prices remained largely constrained.
Smart contracts are a central element of this new image. From ETH’s perspective alone, they appeared as minor participants in Ethereum’s wealth distribution. In aggregate, they control nearly 40% of the capital of the main holders. This is about three times their previous share. According to the report, risk has shifted from individual holders making decisions to automated mechanisms governed by code, collateral design, and token economics.
This change in the distribution of capital holders leads us directly to a more difficult question: what is this capital really made of?
To answer this, the report presents the Press Index, which measures the share of a protocol’s token holdings that are made up of its own self-issued tokens. Among DeFi protocols, this figure represents around 50%, with names like Uniswap, Aave and Mantle among the examples cited.
The report identifies around 20% as the point where self-issued tokens begin to introduce significant risk, and 40-50% as the threshold where a protocol enters fragile territory. At these levels, a balance sheet is no longer primarily supported by external capital: it is partially supported by confidence in itself.
Modest selling pressure can erode that confidence, compress liquidity, and trigger the type of reflexive unwinding seen in the LUNA-UST collapse, where a printing index near 100% contributed to a complete death spiral within days.
The implication on how the economics of Ethereum is analyzed is significant. Once tokens represent the majority of large-address holdings and smart contracts control nearly 40% of that capital, balance size alone becomes a poor indicator of resilience. The Printing Index offers a practical way to look beyond the numbers and assess what really supports the wealth that aggregate rankings are now beginning to reveal.
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