Bitcoin Wealth Inequality Drops in 2019 Unlike Ether, Litecoin: Report

The results showed that Bitcoin's wealth distribution has improved versus 2018, but among the top altcoins by market cap, whales are controlling more and more of the supply.

According to Clovr, which excluded wallets known or suspected to be attached to exchanges, Bitcoin's Gini coefficient - a measure of wealth distribution - fell from 0.66 to 0.64 this year.

By contrast, Bitcoin Cash increased its Gini rating from 0.73 to 0.75, while largest altcoin Ether went from 0.69 to 0.78.Cryptocurrency wealth inequality.

Combined with the lower number of accounts needed for whales to theoretically conspire to control the blockchain, altcoins show themselves to be much more vulnerable than Bitcoin.

For whales to group together and control more than half the supply, the minimum number of controlled wallets for Bitcoin is 4,545.

Researchers: Avoid cryptos with sub-$100M market cap.

Beyond the big players, the research also found wealth inequality to be much more severe among major tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, or ERC-20 tokens.

Chief among these were Huobi Pool Token, the native currency of exchange Huobi's mining pool, which had a Gini coefficient of 0.99 where 70% of the tokens are owned by a single address.

Across ERC-20, the smaller the token's market cap, the bigger the wealth inequality problem becomes.

"If centralized wealth worries you as a cryptocurrency investor, then it may help to avoid buying tokens with a market capitalization of less than $100 million," researchers recommend.