top of page

Can Centralized Ownership be good for Crypto?


The word centralized, in crypto, can sometimes seem like blasphemy. After all, Crypto was intended to be decentralized in nature and remove all middle-men, governing bodies and banks. Instead, we have Centralized Exchanges popping up all over the internet, providing users with fiat on and off ramps. Instead, we have a large portion of the top coins having 75%+ ownership by a small percentage of wallets.


When it comes to the ownership of cryptocurrencies, it seems that fully decentralized cryptocurrency ownership are few and far between that are successful. More often than not, the coins or tokens that have done the best in price performance have moderate to highly centralized ownership.


Shiba Inu, has 73.0961% of the supply in the top 22 wallets. Bitcoin has 94.58% of its supply held by 2.01% of the wallets. Ethereum has slightly less, but still has 39.37% of its supply controlled by the top 100 holders, 32.80% controlled by the top 50, 26.77% is controlled by the top 20 and 22.89% controlled by the top 10. So it seems that centralized ownership may have some correlation to long term price protection or price appreciation.


So why is it that when certain cryptocurrencies have a similar or less supply to any of the crypto's listed above, They get labeled as scams?


Well unfortunately, Centralized ownership has been used time and time again to do was is classically known as a "Rug Pull". This means that the developers or owners of the majority of supply just sell off the 90% or so and cash out, leaving investors holding the worthless bag at the end. So what are some commonalities among these scams?


Anonymity, low engagement, public team infighting, claims of large investments for funding, lack of audits or fake audits, incomplete projects, and many more are c