Gnosis receives $2.3B in a day, now 3rd largest ETH holder with 2.2% of supply

The decentralized finance platform Gnosis is now the third-largest holder of the Ether (ETH) coin supply. Gnosis’ multi-signature storage safe received a deposit of 1,500,000 ETH on Jan. 14 — worth over $1.7 billion at the time of the transaction.

Although its foray into the storage industry began a little over a month ago, a vast majority of the ETH in the Gnosis safe appeared in the past 24 hours. Up until a few days prior, the address contained just 250,001 ETH. But a 600,000 ETH ($677 million) transaction on Jan. 13, followed by Thursday’s, sent Gnosis from 32nd to third among Ethereum’s largest custodians.

These two deposits increased the number of ETH in Gnosis’ safe to over 2.5 million, equating to a total dollar value of over $2.9 billion. That moved Gnosis up the Ether rich list, making it the third-largest holder of the ETH coin supply behind only Binance, and Ethereum itself.

Although 16.7% of the ETH coin supply is held by just 10 addresses, all are either storage addresses used by cryptocurrency exchanges or function as smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

The densest accumulation of ETH is currently found in the Wrapped Ether (WETH) contract, which contains 5,222,572 ETH, or 4.57% of the total supply, worth $6.2 billion. Wrapped Ether facilitates the transfer of ETH into an ERC-20 compatible token for use in Dapps and DeFi applications.

The second-largest holder of ETH is Binance. The 2,897,785 ETH ($3.4 billion) held by the exchange represents the sum of all customers’ deposits stored in that particular wallet.

Gnosis announced its arrival on the cryptocurrency scene in 2017 when it closed out a $12 million initial coin offering in just 10 minutes — a world record at the time. Initially presented as a blockchain-based prediction market, the project has since expanded into numerous corners of decentralized finance.

While no one individual owns any of the above rich list addresses, many cryptocurrency enthusiasts abide by the motto of “not your keys, not your coins”. Such people would say that customers of cryptocurrency exchanges who give up their private keys essentially abandon control of their funds.

The line between crypto owner and crypto custodian isn’t always clear, however most major cryptocurrency exchanges now claim to employ security measures such as multi-signature wallets, which demand the presence of multiple private keys before coins can be moved.