What We Know About the Dogecoin Address That Holds 27% of Its Supply

By Andrew Asmakov

Dogecoin has been regularly making the headlines in the past few weeks, and there’s even more speculation on the role that Tesla CEO Elon Musk could have played in the meme coin’s ecosystem.

Earlier today, Musk sent a string of tweets about Dogecoin, calling it “the people’s crypto” and helping the coin’s price to spike 40% in an hour.

Those who have followed the crypto space a bit longer would remember, though, that this is not the first time he has spoken about Dogecoin. Back in April 2019, responding to a comment related to a joke poll which saw Musk elected as the preferable CEO of Dogecoin, the billionaire said that it “might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool.”

Coincidentally, two months prior to that, a new address appeared on Dogecoin's network, and since then it has been regularly receiving new transactions, many of them containing pretty hefty amounts.

“Personally I don't think it is all coincidence, but yes the evidence is by no means conclusive. Certainly a massive crypto whale of some sort. To own 20% of DOGE which has floated in the top 25-50 coins for years now, and doesn't have an organization, VC, or DAO behind it, is very notable,” wrote one speculator on popular Bitcoin forum BitcoinTalk last month.

While the very first transaction in February 2019 saw it receiving a modest 100 DOGE, other transactions contained hundreds of millions of coins. Since then the address has amassed almost 34.9 billion DOGE, or over $1.2 billion in today’s prices.

With the circulating supply of 128.2 billion DOGE, this represents 27% of all available coins–certainly something to make you think about how centralized Dogecoin might be.

This is exactly the issue Changpeng Zhao, CEO of crypto exchange Binance, highlighted earlier today as well. In his view, having Musk as a PR manager and being decentralized in the sense that there’s no core team of developers can probably be considered as positive thing, but with a vast amount of coins sitting in a handful of addresses, there are real risks of centralization.

“1 address holds 27% of all #DOGE. Top 20 addresses hold more than 50%+ of all #DOGE. Kinda "centralized" in that sense,” tweeted Zhao.

The other big addresses, that Zhao refers to, have substantially fewer coins than the top one. He said that he wasn’t aware whether those are exchange or mining pool addresses, nor who owns them.

The mystery of the largest address has been a point of discussion for some time. Last year, some Redditors discussed it, when it was worth some $20 million, with no definite answer found.

However, a Redditor going under the nickname of Fulvio55 insisted that none of those top wallets belong to real people. “They're generally cold storage for exchanges and the like. Also, none of the 'celebrities' around here hold any coins to speak of,” he wrote back then.

Other Redditors noted that while there are users who hold massive amounts of DOGE, they are not putting them into single addresses since “even in Dogecoin you get some not so friendly folks.” The possibility of Jackson Palmer, the co-creator of the meme cryptocurrency, being the owner of the largest address, has also been ruled out.

But whoever it is, they must have been watching the recent 10X spike with glee. Unless, it’s an exchange, of course.

Recommended News