58% of Ethereum’s wealth is hiding in plain sight, and half of DeFi is built on thin air
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Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only. Ethereum’s top holders double in size when tokens and stablecoins are included in on-chain valuations. Summary Aggregating ETH with tokens shows top holders control $426 billion, over 2x higher than ETH-only rankings reveal. Including ERC-20s shifts power view, with smart contracts holding nearly 40% of top Ethereum balances. New PPI metric flags self-minted DeFi exposure, warning of fragility if selling pressure triggers unwind risks. Ethereum’s balance sheet looks nothing like what it looked like a couple of years ago. A new on-chain analysis has found that 58% of capital held by Ethereum’s largest addresses exists outside of Ethereum (ETH) entirely — sitting in ERC-20 tokens and stablecoins that traditional rankings simply don’t capture. When Ethereum addresses are ranked by ETH balance alone, the top 10,000 hold a combined $189 billion. Rank those same addresses by total assets — ETH plus ERC-20 tokens and stablecoins — and that figure climbs to $426 billion. The capital sitting at the top of Ethereum’s economy is more than twice as large as conventional rankings suggest. The gap is not just a numbers story. It reveals an entirely different cast of major holders. Among the top 1,000 addresses, only 537 appear in both the ETH-only and the aggregated rankings, meaning nearly half of Ethereum’s largest holders are effectively invisible when the market looks at ETH balances alone. The composition of those holdings tells its own story. ETH now represents just 42% of what the largest addresses hold. Stablecoins account for roughly 26%, with the remaining share spread across ERC-20 tokens. A form of dominance shift has already taken place through quiet balance-sheet accumulation across protocols and tokens while prices remained largely range-bound. Smart contracts…
Filed under: News - @ February 24, 2026 10:29 pm