What is the best estimate of number of individuals who hold Algo? 100k, 1M, 10M?
We have some related metrics but (AFAIK) nothing specific for the actual community size. For example different metrics are extracted from the on-chain data, active addresses, addresses with certain sizes of Algo, governors, etc. However there are individuals who may have multiple addresses. More importantly there are many people who keep their Algo on CEX. For example, Binance, Coinbase, Upbit, Kraken, etc. each one’s wallets has more than a couple hundred millions Algo. Even if a portion of that belongs to the exchange itself the remaining likely belongs to tens of thousands people.
Tracking the community size and its growth is important and currently missing in the transparency report. One of the success metrics for the foundation is the rate of community growth.
The foundation can ask exchanges for the number of individuals who own Algo. Some of them may provide it and others can be estimated based on their wallet sizes relative to other exchanges. There is also a possibility to estimate the number based on the hot wallets transactions assuming that’s proportional to the Algo interest on that particular exchange.
Hi @awesomecrypto your question is really well timed. The Allo explorer has just released its new metrics dashboard. Take it for a spin https://metrics.allo.info/
Thanks for the response. The new metrics page is great. However, we have had the addresses-holdings information in algoexplorer and chaintrail.io (addresses section). The information is useful but nowhere close to the actual number. The addresses doesn’t tell us about the number of individual holders, because many addresses are generated by bots/systems and many holders have multiple accounts. Additionally, a more important and challenging issue is counting people who keep their Algo in CEXes. Binance, Coinbase and Upbit each have more than 500M Algo. There are several other CEXes with multi hundred million Algo. I think there are a large number of Algo holders who are silent and we don’t know about them.
I’ll ask Simon and Michele if it’s possible to gather data about individual holders.
As I understand it, it is quite hard to gather this type of data in crypto generally.
There are various sources of data that can be used with statistical approaches and some reasonable assumptions to get to some acceptable estimates. That would be the start over time the approach and data can be polished and improved.
Example data point:
Basic onchain data, active addresses, Algo balance, other token balances that can indicate the same or different individuals with a good certainty. Different tokens provide different information.
CEX hot wallets and transfers to and from them. Exchanges have a separate address per account for deposits and most of them don’t re-use them for any other purpose later.
For CEXes, I think reaching out to them and seeing if any of them is open to provide any data (e.g., the number of algo holders on their exchange) might work too. Having one CEX data and combining that with other data (algo balances, transfers, etc) can be used as a basis for estimating other CEXes individual accounts.
Talking about CEXes, a basic useful metric, independent of number of Algo holders, is to know the number of Algos each SEX holds.
Governance participants in the last few years
AF has some information about the initial transfers/sales (with KYC) that could be useful for analyzing the later distribution.
I think it is also good to share the methodology with the Algorand community on reddit and ask for feedback. I think you’ll hear many other good ideas/feedback that can help improve the approach.
Please note that this metric is very important and needs to be tracked so we need to start from somewhere. I have been in communication with the CFO in order to include this data in the future transparency reports. I have also exchnged a number of messages with the CMO (Marc) and he plans to use this data as well. You may want to talk to both of them.