Question in detail:

Where in the ocean of NEAR do the whales hang out? Examine the top 20 addresses by amount of NEAR held - excluding any custodial or exchange addresses that you can. Can you identify any “power players” or wallets of interest? What behaviors do these whales exhibit?

Overview of analysis:

In this investigation, the holders of $NEAR token have been determined. This analysis has been divided into the following parts:

• The $NEAR holders and distribution of wallets by their held $NEAR have been underestimated
• The Identification of Whales and compare the actions of these Whales with ordinary users as:

  • Sectors and popular programs by various users

  • The Staking performance

  • The Swap actions

  • Participation on NFT Secondary sale

• Top 20 holders and their behavior

NEAR Blockchain:

Near is a public, sharded, extensible blockchain network based on the proof-of-stake (POS) paradigm. Developers can use this platform to launch their own decentralized applications (similar to the Ethereum network). The token of this network is called NEAR, which is the functional token of this network. The main goal of the NEAR network is to create an infrastructure for creating a new Internet. In the new internet, it will be harder for big companies to access people's personal information. Countries cannot ban some programs and destroy their business in this system. A world of freedom where everyone can act freely.

This platform uses sharding technology to solve the problem of scalability. In this model, a transaction does not need to be checked by all network nodes. With sharding, a network is turned into several parallel networks that check transactions simultaneously, so that each transaction is checked in a shard. As a result, only nodes present in a shard will check and confirm this transaction, and other nodes present in other shards of the network will not check this transaction. This idea makes the capacity of the network increase significantly.

Reference

Part 1: Stats related to $NEAR holders

NEAR holders and Whales:

NEAR token is a native digital currency of NEAR blockchain. Suggested and current uses for NEAR are:

• Staking token is required for verifiers to do work on the network and earn rewards.
• The token is a reward for those who adopted and welcomed this network before others.
• The fee token is used to pay for transactions in the network.
• A token is also intended for storage deposit accounts.
• Reserve assets are intended for secondary tokens, such as stablecoins.
• A token is also used to participate in the future management and development of the ecosystem.

In the cryptocurrency market, some people have a lot of coins or tokens; So much that they can completely change the currency price change process in a short period of time. Each of these Whales can cause the cryptocurrency market, including Bitcoin, to fluctuate wildly; Obviously, when they can influence the Bitcoin market, it is easily possible for them to cause extreme fluctuations on other altcoins as well.

Reference

Key Findings:

This detailed analysis related to the top 20 holders of NEAR are summarized as below:

• From the count of interaction point of view, the CEX sector is the most popular sector among these top holders.
• Okex and Kucoin are two of the most popular projects that these top holders interacted with them by considering the volume of interaction aspect.
• The Sweet program is the most dominant program among top 20 holders of $NEAR based on the count of interaction.
• Among these top holders, one of them has been staked more than 20 million tokens as delegator. This Whale is the leader of delegation on NEAR protocol.
• The USDT-WNEAR is the most popular swap pair according to the count swaps by these top $NEAR holders.
• However, the wNEAR-WBTC is the most popular swap pair according to the volume of trade in USD. Therefore, the main reason for this swap pair can be to take advantage of the opportunity to profit from the price of Bitcoin on specific dates. Because Bitcoin is the leader of the crypto market.

Part 3: Behavior of top 20 $NEAR holders

Key Findings:

After identifying the $NEAR holders and distribution of $NEAR tokens among wallets, in this part the activity of $NEAR Whales on various aspects have been determined:

• The most popular sector among $NEAR Whales by considering count of interactions is CEX and for ordinary users this popular sector is dapp.

• From the perspective of volume, the Binance is the most popular projects among Whales. Also, the Berry Club is the most popular project by Whales from the count of interaction point of view.

• About 21% of $NEAR stake belong to Whales and the rest of it by ordinary users.

• The average and median volume of stake by Whales are far larger than ordinary users.

• On November 7 2022, the highest volume of $NEAR stake by Whales occurred with over 22.4 million tokens.

• Now lets identify the swap activity by Whale. As can be seen about 56% of swaps done by Whales based on the volume of swaps in USD.

• The highest participation by Whales on trade activity of NEAR blockchain coincided with the Terra collapse (May 9 to 16).

• The average volume of swaps by Whales is more than 11k USD.

• The most popular swap pair between Whales is WBTC- WNEAR with considering swap volume in USD. Also, the share of various user types on each popular swap pair demonstrated in the related content.

• NEAR network Whales have less participation in buying and selling of NFTs (less than 2% of volume).

• The average volume of purchase for NFTs by Whales is about twice as much as ordinary users.

Part 2-4: Participation on NFT sale

Part 2-3: Swap activity

Part 2-2: Staking activity

Part 2-1: Sectors and most popular programs

Part 2: Activity of Whales and ordinary users on NEAR

Key Findings:

This detailed analysis related to the proposals of wrapped assets and related liquidity pool have been represent in this part:

• The average NEAR token held by wallets is about 122 tokens.
• The current number of Whales according to the definition is about 710 unique wallets. These wallets held over 83% of total held $NEAR tokens and the domination of Whales on NEAR protocol is considerably high.
• The average amount of held $NEAR by Whales is about 438k $NEAR. The difference of these numbers with average held amount by ordinary users is very large.
• The distribution of $NEAR token shown that the most of the $NEAR holders held under 10 tokens.
• Now lets exclude the largest group (Below 10 $NEAR) and find out the distribution of wallets.
• About 65% of users held between 10-100 tokens and its the higher group of wallets for balance (Over 10 $NEAR).

Methodology:

The data provided by Flipside has been used to handle this analysis.

• Step 1: Find out the held $NEAR token by wallets
  • Table→ near.core.fact_transfers
  • Method→ Difference of total received and sent $NEAR tokens
  • Exclude the addresses with Label on NEAR to identify the real users
• Step 2: Distribution of $NEAR tokens among wallets
• Step 3: Whales are wallets with over 50,000 $NEAR
• Step 4: Action done by Whales and compare them with ordinary users→

  • Popular sectors and programs on NEAR

  • Staking

  • Bridge transfers

  • Swaps

• Step 5: Identify top 20 holders by amount of $NEAR held

Part 4: Summary and references

According to the results of the previous sections as well as the behavior of top 20 $NEAR holders, the following decisions can be made:

• In general, the value of digital currencies is determined by supply and demand. This means that if a large portion of the supply of a particular digital currency goes out of circulation, the price of the remaining digital currencies in circulation will increase. Similarly, if a large number of cryptocurrencies are suddenly liquidated, their value will decrease. For this reason, cryptocurrency whales are particularly capable of manipulating the cryptocurrency market and can change it to their advantage.
• Also, the behavior of whales and especially the performance of the top 20 holders can also indicate the future of NEAR blockchain. As it is clear from the results, the whales are either looking to convert their assets into stablecoins or are looking to profit from market movements, especially Bitcoin. The projects in the NEAR network also have a positive effect on attracting whales.
• $NEAR whales are individuals and entities that hold millions of digital currencies. Digital currency whales have a lot of influence in the market and are very rich, because they play an important role in driving up and down the prices of bull and bear markets. Being aware of the activity of digital currency whales is a positive point in your investment strategy and research that you should keep in mind.

Author:

Credited by MZG

Discord handle: m.zamani#0361

Twitter handle: @GargariZamani

Useful links:

• NEAR blockchain
• Whales on Crypto
• NEAR scanner