What Are Hive's Whales Up To?

Yesterday we saw that only 4 people hold ~30% of H(P)

As @dagger212 rightly pointed out it is actually a bit lower when only accounting for HP, but the point I was trying to make was that far too few hold far too much HP (and Hive) on Hive. There is no way of sugarcoating it, Hive's distribution is too concentrated (for my taste anyways). But I think we have to look at what these accounts are exactly doing. So this is what this post is about.

What are the top 20 HP accounts doing?

Have they powered up/down, have they sold Hive or bought more? How do they utilize their HP? Who is behind the account? etc. For now, let's just look at the basics. These are the accounts (and their relative share of HP):

1	@freedom	9.8% (+liquid Hive)
2	@blocktrades	7.3%
3	@alpha	4.8%
4	@darthknight	4.3% (+liquid Hive)
5	@theycallmedan	2.3%
6	@blocktrades.com	1.9%
7	@steemmonsters	1.7%
8	@mika	1.3%
9	@rancheloraxo	1.2%
10	@adm	1.1%
11	@jamesc	1.1%
12	@elmerlin	1.1%
13	@honey-swap	<1%
14	@themarkymark	<1%
15	@trafalgar	<1%
16	@xeldal	<1%
17	@altleft	<1%
18	@gtg	<1%
19	@roadscape	<1%
20	@pharesim	<1%

 

I think it could help when we look at some basic info here:

• are they "public figures" on the chain?
• are they witnesses?
• when were they last active (account movements)?
• what kind of activity is there?
• how much is being delegated to other accounts?

 

#	name	public	witness	last active	activity	delegation
1	freedom	no	no	2022	50k Hive sent to @appreciator	100%
2	blocktrades	yes	yes	Recently	mainly posting/commenting	30%
3	alpha	no	no	Recently	claiming account tokens, voting etc.	0%
4	darthknight	no	no	2022/2023	commenting, powered up and sold in 2021	100%
5	theycallmedan	yes	no	Recently	various	30%
6	blocktrades.com	yes	no	Recently	former exchange account for blocktrades	~0%
7	steemmonsters	yes	no	Recently	Splinterlands account	~0%
8	mika	no	no	Never	Sold >1M Hive in 2023; all stake delegated to @appreciator	100%
9	rancheloraxo	no	no	Recently	commenting, voting, claiming rewards	~15%
10	adm	no	no	Recently	voting (also downvoting), HBD.fund/hivewatcher connection	60%
11	jamesc	no	no	2023	commenting, voting, not receiving any delegation rewards	100%
12	elmerlin	no	no	Recently	various	80%
13	honey-swap	no	no	Recently	Hive-Engine exchange	~0%
14	themarkymark	yes	yes	Recently	various	0%
15	trafalgar	no	no	Recently	various	0%
16	xeldal	no	no	Recently	various, sold >100k Hive in 2023	0%
17	altleft	no	no	Inactive?	only using 0.06% of stake	0%
18	gtg	yes	yes	Recently	various	0%
19	roadscape	no	no	2020	only delegation rewards	100%
20	pharesim	no	yes	Recently	various	100%

We can see many of these accounts are using their stake to receive delegation rewards. This means that they are not actively curating content. With these levels of Hive, this is of course understandable, although it would be better for the chain if they more actively managed their stake. We can see that appreciator is one of the biggest accounts that is receiving delegation from these and other accounts in the following chart by @dalz:

Altleft seems to be largely inactive and has perhaps forgotten about his account since he is not using his/her massive HP. There are also a couple of other accounts that seem to be inactive. Freedom is itself not very active, but using all of its stake for delegation rewards passively. An extreme case is also mika that has never been active, meaning the account never did any social transaction like commenting or blogging. It's also the account that has compared to the others sold a very big amount of Hive (or at least sent it to an exchange).

However, most accounts are active in some form, and a good share of them are also active on the frontends and interacting with the community. Only 4 of them are *witnesses and only 6 of them are what I would call "public figures" - most are rather (pseudo) anonymous. There are also 2 exchange accounts as well as one dapp/gaming account (Splinterlands).

Conclusions

What does this tell us? While this is clearly only a very superficial overview, it nevertheless seems so show that the overwhelming majority of the accounts (18/20) have never really sold any meaningful amount of Hive in the last 1-2 years, or powered down etc. They seem to be all interested in further building their stake and using their stake to curate content or using it for delegation and thus receiving a major passive income. As @edicted pointed out, we actually want whales to sell their Hive since it would contribute to the distribution of the network. Of course we do not want them to sell too much too fast (it would severely dump Hive's price), but we can only wonder why they are letting it grow this much (of course it's no secret that another bull run is around the corner).

Overall I have to again state that I am not too happy with such a skewed distribution. But with these accounts essentially letting Hive sit in their wallets, it's almost as if they are acting like a huge sink for Hive's inflation (although I have no doubt that many will sell quite heavily if Hive is at around $3+ again).

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