Try Quests to earn NEARThe Whales of NEAR
Introduction
- In this Analysis, You will read about the top 20 wallets on the Near chain based on Near Balance. We want to know what are Top 20 wallets ( Whales ) do on Near chain over the past year. So, I went through the Near chain and analyzed these parameters:
- Top 20 Wallets
- Top Wallets changes
- Top 20 wallets activities
- Transfers
- Stake and Unstake
- Swap
- CEXs
Analyzed by Hess - Reading Time Almost 8 Min.
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Top 20 wallets in 2022 Vs. 2023
The fact that 65% of top wallets have changed over the past year is interesting. Only 35% of the top 20 wallets in 2022 remain in the top 20 in 2023.
Furthermore, the top wallet in 2022 held 6M Near, while the top wallet in 2023 held more than 20M Near. The top 20 wallets in 2022 had some wallets that had less than 1 million Near, while the top 20 wallets in 2023 had a minimum Near of 1.6 million Near.
Transactions & Fees by Top 20 wallets
I would like to point out that the below charts show activities by the top 20 wallets on Near.
- The top 20 wallets on Near had below 5K transactions per month in September 2021, and the average paid fee per month was 0.3. It seems that they were less active. The whales' activities increased between September 2021 and September 2022, but not too much.
- Near whales started to become more active after October 2022. Approximately 5 Near were paid monthly in total fees for the 14K transactions.
- Among the top 20, only two wallets spent more than 10 Near on transactions. There were less than 50% of top 20 wallets that were active over the last 1-2 years, while others had fewer activities.
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In addition to the transactions type, which covers all activities on Near chain, I examined some key activities on each chain. It includes stakes and un stakes, swaps, NFTs, and transfers.
Top 20 wallets did not use swap on near chain but instead used CEXs to swap their tokens. They also had fewer staking and unstaking activities. However, These metrics are based on transactions. In the next parts, I will examine staked amounts.
Transfer activities by top 20 whales
It has been more common for Whales to send than to receive over the past three years. On the other hand, they received more Near than sent based on the total amount received. About 32.5% of transactions was receive, and 67.5% was send.
- Each month, their transfer activities increased. Top 20 whales received and sent the most transfers between September 2022 and January 2023.
510M Near were received by Top 20 whales, and 404M were sent by them. Each whale received 32M and sent 28.8M on average.
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Transfers per Whale
The following chart shows how many transactions and amounts each whale sent and received.
- Around 25% of whales had more activities (more than 1K transactions) than others based on total transactions. Approximately 60% of whales sent and received fewer than ten transactions.
- Based on the total amount of Near transferred, two whales transferred more Near than others. One of them sent 268M Near and received 270M. Similarly, the other recipient received 135M Near and sent 130M Near.
Stake & Unstake by Top 20 Whales
- In terms of transactions, Top 20 wallets didn't stake too much, but in terms of Near amount, they staked the right amount of Near. Over the last two years, the top 20 whales staked 45M Near and un staked only 1M Near.
- The average staked amount was 2.1M per whale, and the unstaked amount was 14K. Top 20 whales haven't staked since December 2022.
- The figment pool is the most popular validator chosen by whales. In that pool, they staked nearly 30M Near. Hashquark and Stake1 followed figment.
- Hashquark pool has the highest amount of Near unstaked.
Whales Activities based on Transaction Events
You may be familiar with Transactions recording event names in each chain. Near has its events name. As a result, I examined the transaction events of the top 20 whales.
- The first place goes to ft_transfer with 32.4K transactions. Storage_deposit takes the next place with 7K transactions.
- You can see the share of activities per whale in the chart below.
Transactions type by top 20 whales
- Among the top 20 whales on Near, there weren't too many types of activities. Top 20 wallets mostly transfer to CEX and use Dapps, as can be seen from the chart.
- Until August 2022, CEX transactions accounted for more than 99.8% of all transactions (almost 100%).
- Previously, they were only transferring money to CEXs, but after August 2022, they began taking a large share of CEXs with their Dapps activities. Occasionally, other activities like mining NFTs took place, but not too often.
- A total of 50% of transactions were related to dapps, and 49.4% were transferring near amounts to CEXs.
Methodology
Top 20 Whales:
- Neither Flipside nor other Data Providers have Near Balance tables. As a result, I calculated the total amount of transfers from and to wallets using the Transfer table on Flipside. Based on the remaining near amount, I limit 20 wallets with the highest remaining near amount. There were some wallets related to Near tokens or pools. I removed them from my list. Using Nearscan's website, I checked the accuracy of my results.
Activities:
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Each chain has a number of key activities. Swaps, stakes, transfers, NFTs, and so on. Each of these activities has its own table. Based on the top 20 wallets, I counted the total number of transactions per each activity. Every transaction has an event name as well. I looked for the top 20 wallet activities based on Event names.
CEXs:
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I extracted CEX names from the DIM label table. Next, I combined my findings with the transfer table and matched receivers to CEX addresses.
Full Analysis
Top 20 Whales
Firstly, let's know the top 20 wallets based on their near balance. My next step will be to examine their activity over the past 1-2 years after I know about Near whales.
- Near chain has three wallets that hold more than 19M Near. Top wallet holds 21.4M Near, second wallet holds 20.8M. Next comes the third wallet with 19.6M Near. There is a big difference between these three wallets and other top wallets, which hold below 8M Near.
- Only three wallets hold a total of 54% of Near among these top 20.
- Among the top 20 wallets, the maximum Near balance is 21.4M, while the minimum Near balance is 1.6M. An average Near balance of 5.9M Near is found among the top 20 wallets.
- The top 20 wallets hold 117M Near, while Near's circulating supply is around 900M.
One of the most popular CEXs for top 20 Near whales is OKEX, and the other is Kucoin. Combined, these two CEXs had over 12K attendees. Binance and Coinbase are not among the top three CEXs.
As I mentioned before, the top 20 whales are less likely to use swap on DEXs. The two most popular tokens that whales swap from and to are USDC and USDT. Near token is ranked third after these two tokens.
Note: The left chart shows the top wallets that sent and received Near from TOP 20 whales. These wallets aren't among the top 20 whales.
I removed Binancecold3 from top 20 whales because it was CEX's address. Based on transfers to non-whales wallets, Binance cold3 is ranked first.
You can see other non-whales wallets.
Conclusion
- Nearly 117M Near are held in the wallets of the top 20 whales. Nearly 5 million Near are held on average.
- The maximum Near balance among top 20 whales is 21M, and the minimum Near balance is 1.6M.
- Approximately 65% of the top whales in 2022 had changed in 2023, and only 35% remain in the top 20 whales.
- The most popular activity for Top 20 whales is transfer, while stake, unstake, and swap have the lowest numbers.
- Two popular CEXs that top 20 whales sent Near to are OKEX and Kucoin.
- The number of swaps was below ten. As a result, stablecoins are the most popular assets for swapping.
- Over the last two years, the top 20 whales have transferred 404M Near and received 505M.
- Over time, the top 20 whales staked 45M Near and unstaked only 1M.
- For the top 20 whales, FIGMENT is the most popular validator.
ALL CODES AND CONTENTS WERE WRITTEN BY HESS.