Supply Distribution
How a token's total circulating supply is spread across different holders, commonly analyzed by grouping addresses into size tiers such as whales, mid-size holders, and small holders.
Supply distribution describes how concentrated or spread out a token's circulating supply is across its holder base, typically analyzed by grouping wallet addresses into size tiers — such as large "whale" holders, mid-size holders, and many small retail holders — and examining what share of total supply each tier controls. A highly concentrated supply distribution, where a small number of addresses hold a large majority of supply, generally implies greater price-manipulation risk and governance-concentration risk than a more evenly spread distribution.
Supply distribution analysis depends heavily on entity clustering (see Kaavon's "Entity Clustering" glossary definition), since raw address-level data alone can be misleading — a seemingly large number of "holders" might actually just be many addresses controlled by one entity, such as an exchange holding customer deposits across many internal addresses. Supply distribution is also a function of time, since early-stage tokens from a recent launch or vesting schedule often start out far more concentrated than they may become later, as tokens vest and get distributed more broadly.
Examples
- A token where the top ten addresses hold more than half of total supply has a highly concentrated supply distribution, implying greater manipulation and governance-concentration risk.
- Supply distribution analysis needs entity clustering to be meaningful, since an exchange's many internal customer-deposit addresses could otherwise be mistakenly counted as many separate independent holders.