Who Owns The Most SOL? | SOL Holders (2024)

Once a top cryptocurrency, now struggling to stay afloat, Solana (SOL) blockchain’s native token lost over 70% of its value since November 2022 following the demise of the FTX crypto exchange.

With Sam Bankman-Fried being a prominent early investor, who has the most solana coins as the coin is suffering through a bear market? Here we take a look at the biggest solana holders.

SOL/USD live price

What is Solana?

Solana, known as the “Ethereum killer”, is the first blockchain to introduce a Proof-of-History (PoH) consensus mechanism that fastens operations while keeping them secure and decentralised.

The platform was founded in 2017 by former Qualcomm (QCOM) employee and Dropbox software engineer Anatoly Yakovenko and his colleague Greg Fitzgerald. The founders aimed to create an open-source project that implemented a new, high-performance permissionless blockchain.

Unlike the algorithms used by major blockchains, like Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS), PoH can process over 250,000 transactions per second with the goal to process over 710,000 transactions per second.

It is important to note that Solana does not solely use a PoH consensus mechanism but incorporates a mix of PoH’s timing mechanism and PoS’s protocol structure. This is what helps the blockchain conduct fast transactions, be more scalable and not rely on Layer2 systems for sharding.

According to Solana’s website, the blockchain prides itself in being:

• Fast: the platform claims to have block times of 400 milliseconds and will continue to increase speed as it develops.

• Decentralised: the network is validated by thousands of nodes that operate independently. This ensures that user data is safe and free of censorship.

• Scalable: the platform is made “to handle thousands of transactions per second”. Fees remain less than $0.01 for both developers and users.

• Energy efficient: the blockchain was able to minimise its environmental impact due to its PoS protocol structure resulting in a 0% net carbon impact.

Moreover, Solana users can:

• Mint, sell and trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

• Create their own decentralised finance (DeFi) projects and write smart contracts.

• Build Web3 games.

• Accept payments in cryptocurrencies.

The blockchain’s native cryptocurrency, SOL, is an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum network. The cryptocurrency is used to pay for transaction fees and any purchases in the Solana ecosystem and staking.

Who owns the most solana?

According to data provided by CoinMarketCap, SOL has an unlimited maximum supply and a total token supply surpassing 537 million coins. This makes the token an inflationary coin, while cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC) are deflationary because they have a limit on how many tokens can be mined.

As of 6 January 2023, the token had a circulating supply surpassing 367 million coins and a market capitalisation of $5.03bn.

Initially, the cryptocurrency was distributed in five different funding rounds, four of which were private sales. SOL’s initial supply was 500 million tokens and the cryptocurrency’s initial token distribution is as follows:

• 15.86% went to Seed Round investors

• 2.63% went to Founding Sale investors

• 5.07% went to Validator Sale investors

• 1.84% went to Strategic Sale investors

• 1.6% went to Public Auction Sale investors

• 12.5% went to team members

• 12.5% went to the Solana Foundation

• 38% went to the Community reserve fund which is managed by the Solana Foundation

So, who owns the most solana today?

According to data on CoinCarp as of 6 January 2023 there were 9,154,449 wallets holding solana tokens. The cryptocurrency’s ownership was fragmented with single wallet addresses holding a minimum amount of the token’s total supply.

According to data collected by the website, the 10 top holders of solana collectively owned 9.06% of the total token supply while the 100 biggest solana holders owned over 33% of the total coin supply.

The 100 richest solana holders on CoinCarp were anonymous wallets, which makes it harder to speculate who owns the most solana. The biggest SOL wallet owned 1.86% of the coin’s total token supply which amounted to over 9.5 million coins.

The other four top solana holders were:

• An anonymous wallet held 0.93% of the total supply or 4.7 million coins.

• An anonymous wallet held 0.93% of the total supply or 4.7 million coins.

• An anonymous wallet held 0.90% of the total supply or 4.6 million coins.

• An anonymous wallet held 0.88% of the total supply or 4.5 million coins.

The most prominent movements across the 100 largest wallets holding SOL tokens in the last week include a gain of over 800,000 SOL coins by the biggest wallet.

Is Sam Bankman-Fried the biggest SOL holder?

Prior to FTX’s bankruptcy, Alameda Research, the crypto exchange platform’s sister hedge fund, held over $1.19 billion SOL tokens according to reports by CoinDesk , as the platform’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried was an early investor of the cryptocurrency.

As of 6 January 2023, Alameda was said to still hold over 48 million locked and staked SOL tokens representing 66.1% of all locked stake, data on Solana Compass showed. Meanwhile, a report published by the Daily Hodl suggested that these holdings may be in the hands of liquidators.

What’s next for SOL?

Some of the biggest news affecting SOL’s performance continue to be closely related to the downfall of the FTX crypto exchange and its close relationship to the cryptocurrency.

A tweet published by crypto reporter Wu Blockchain on 29 December 2022 noted that the asset management platform Matrixpot decided to delist SOL and SOL-U dual-currency from its platform starting from 30 December and said it will no longer be launching any new Solana products.

The demise of the FTX platform forced SOL to lose over 70% of its value dropping down to $9.7558 as of 29 December 2022 from a high of $33.78 on 5 November 2022.

In addition, the Solana NFT project DeGods announced on 26 December 2022 that it would “officially bridge Ethereum in Q1 of 2023” and leave the Solana blockchain for good. The Y00ts NFT project made a similar announcement saying that it “will officially bridge to Polygon in Q1 2023”.

Although it may not be all bad for the cryptocurrency as it gained some support from Ethereum (ETH) co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, who tweeted on 29 December 2022 that the blockchain has a “bright future”. This helped the SOL token gain some momentum surging by about 35% to $13.18 as of 6 January 2023.

Final thoughts

Note that cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile, and should be traded with caution. This article on who owns the most solana does not constitute investment advice. You should always conduct your own due diligence before trading, looking at the latest news, fundamental and technical analysis, and a wide range of analyst commentary.

Remember, past performance does not guarantee future returns. And never trade more money than you can afford to lose.

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