Try Quests to earn cryptoIn this post I investigate the distribution of Uniswap's UNI token.
What is UNI?
On 16 September 16, 2020, Uniswap announced the launch of the UNI token.
Any address that used Uniswap was airdropped 400 UNI tokens (~3700$ in today's value). Thanks to this airdrop, UNI is said to be one of the most widely distributed tokens.
UNI is used for voting and governance actions in the Uniswap protocol.
(Source:coinguides.org)
There are different ways to visualize the distribution of a token. To me, the easiest way to quickly grasp the distribution of a token is to separate addresses by balance held.
In the following chart, I separate wallets into 8 buckets based on the amount of UNI they hold.
Wallet balances are queried from Flipside's ethereum.erc20_balances, where symbol='uni'.
UNI is held by a very large number of addresses. Many addresses hold a substantial amount of the token.
UNI was launched 1.5 years ago. There might be some inactive wallets that hold the token. What is the token distribution in active wallets?
In the chart below, I visualize the distribution of UNI in wallets having initiated a transaction sometime during the last 90 days. These addresses are defined as 'active wallets'.
UNI distribution in active wallets resembles the distribution previously seen in all wallets.
Compared to the previous chart, a somewhat larger share of addresses hold 100 to 1,000 UNI and 1,000 to 10,000 UNI.
Another important aspect of the distribution of a token is the amount held by whales. In the next two charts, I present the percentage of UNI supply held by each of the 100 largest holders of UNI.
At time of writing, UNI is valued at $9.34 per token.
UNI supply is more evenly distributed amongst whales that have recently transacted. None of these addresses holds more than 0.02% of the circulation supply of UNI.
With the intention of excluding institutional addresses, I query ethereum.erc20_balances, this time excluding wallets that have a address_name, a label or a label_subtype. This is because wallets belonging to ordinary users are not labeled.
When attempting to look at the balance of whales, it is crucial to separate addresses belonging to humans from institutional addresses. Institutions such as DAO Treasuries, Centralized Exchanges and other protocols have wallets that can hold large amounts of tokens.
In the process of doing this analysis, I discovered that one address hold 90% of the supply of UNI. Since this address cannot possibly belong to a normal human investor, I chose to exclude user_address != '0x2940c7bca467bab3647213240b40ded5ca746e78' .
Even when excluding labelled addresses, it is hard to remove all institutional addresses.
Amongst the top 100 largest unlabeled UNI holders, two addresses hold the most of the supply of UNI.
These two addresses surely belong to intuitions or protocols that were not labelled in the database.
For this final part of the analysis, I present the percentage of UNI supply held by the 100 largest UNI holders that are active wallets. Active wallets have transacted sometime during the last 90 days.
UNI was one of the first governance token created. It was widely distributed by airdropping to all previous users of Uniswap.
Close to 300,000 addresses hold less than 1,000 UNI.
It is difficult to look at token ownership amongst the largest UNI holders. Many of these addresses belong to protocols and treasuries. A good way to filter out these types of addresses is to look at token distribution amongst active addresses. Another complementary approach is to filter out labelled addresses.
UNI distribution amongst unlabeled, active addresses is more even, with none of the top 100 wallets controlling more than 0.02% of the supply of UNI.