Litecoin Vs Bitcoin: Which one’s more concentrated in terms of ownership?

Bitcoin’s price collapsed to a 10-month low in the second week of March this year. As it hinted at a revival, the coin was valued at $5,263 holding a market cap of $96.16 billion and a 24-hour trading volume of $33.86 billion.

Source: CoinStats | Bitcoin

At times of high volatility in the market, the price movements of whales have been intensely scrutinized as massive coin movements arranged by this group have the power of influencing prices and can create buy or sell trends. This group has been a subject of numerous studies and research.

Bitcoin whales

The number of wallet addresses with more than or equal to 10k BTC has mostly been above 100. For the most part, it has been inversely proportional to Bitcoin’s price. This was not very different from the wallet addresses with a balance of more than or equal to 1k BTC. This range of wallet address balances behaves inversely proportional to Bitcoin’s price action, meaning the number of wallet addresses with this balance range decreased with an increase in the coin’s value.

Source: IntoTheBlock | Concentration

Interestingly, according to IntoTheBlock’s on-chain insights, there is only one whale that holds more than 1.40% of the total Bitcoin circulating supply. At press time, this whale had a balance of 255,502 BTC. The concentration of large Bitcoin holders is 10.98% with 44 addresses.

IntoTheBlock divided BTC large holders between Whales [addresses with more than 1% of the total BTC circulating supply] and Investors [addresses that hold 0.1% to 1.0% of the circulating supply]. All the other addresses were considered Retail.

Source: BitInfoCharts | Top 10 Richest Bitcoin addresses

Source: BitInfoCharts | Top 10 Richest Litecoin addresses

For Litecoin, on the other hand, there are four whales accounting for 1.16%, 1.18%, 2.52%, 2.55% of the total circulating supply of LTC.

With respect to the concentration of large holders, there are 136 addresses with more than 0.1% of the total circulating supply, controlling 46.16%. Of those, only 4 addresses that own 6.77% of the circulating supply have more than 1%. The biggest one has 2.55% of the supply with 1.64 million LTC or $66.94 million.

The rest 53.84% belonged to addresses with less than 0.1% of the total LTC circulating supply. This implied that in terms of concentration of ownership, the silver coin was more concentrated than its counterpart.

Source: IntoTheBlock | Concentration

Top cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin are still held by a small group of whales. In another recent analysis, it was found that Litecoin had the most centralized wealth while investigating four coins- BTC, ETH, LTC, and BCH. The silver coin is among the top coins with the greatest wealth inequality, in which only 189 addresses have assets that account for more than 50% of the total supply. Additionally, the 10 richest Litecoin accounts owned a tenth of all Litecoin wealth.