What is NEAR Protocol?

NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application (dApp) platform and Ethereum competitor that focuses on developer and user-friendliness. Its native $NEAR token is used to pay transaction fees and storage on this protocol. NEAR is a Proof Of Stake (POS) smart contract platform that has fast transaction finality and low transaction fee thanks to its Sharding solution. The blockchain is divided into several segments and the computers involved in the network only process a small part of the whole blockchain data.

$NEAR Token:

NEAR's native token is also called $NEAR and is primarily used to pay transaction fees and as collateral for storing data on the blockchain. NEAR tokens can also be staked by token holders who participate in achieving network consensus as transaction validators. NEAR also rewards several stakeholders in the blockchain with NEAR tokens.

Dashboard Introduction & Methodology

In this dashboard, I am going to first identify the top 20 NEAR wallets with the most amount of held $NEAR within this chain. And then, I am going to analyze their activity within NEAR protocol and to see what are their most popular destinations, protocols & actions in this chain and how has their behavior changed over time.

How To Calculate $NEAR Balance of Wallets?

Since there is not any balance table in Flipside’s NEAR.core tables, We have to calculate the deposited and also withdrawn $NEAR tokens from each wallet using other tables and then extract the actual amount of held $NEAR by each wallet.

Despite Ethereum (and other EVM chains), all of $NEAR-related transactions on NEAR protocol are not included in near.core.fact_transfers table, So, We have to calculate the deposited and withdrawn $NEAR for each seperate action in this chain. Here is the list of $NEAR-related actions that we have to calculate the deposited & withdrawn amount of $NEAR for each action in order to calculate the actual $NEAR balance of wallets:

1. Regular $NEAR Transfers **(**using near.core.fact_transfers table): “-” for sent (withdrawn) $NEARs and “+” for received (deposited) $NEARs.

2. Paid $NEAR For Transactions fees (using near.core.fact_transactions table): “-”

3. $NEAR Swap Transactions (using near.core.ez_dex_swaps table): “-” for swaps from $NEAR to other assets and “+” for swaps from other assets to $NEAR.

4. Multi Sending (using near.core.fact_actions_events_function_call table) with filtering the method_name to ‘multisend_from_balance’ or ‘multisend_from_balance_unsafe’

5. $NEAR Staking (-) and Unstaking Actions (+) (using near.core.fact_actions_events_function_call table)

   There are 2 ways to stake $NEAR” Liquid & Normal

   • Liquid Staking (Metapool & Linear Protocol): Method_Name = ‘deposit_and_stake’ or ‘stake’ / ‘liquid_unstake’ or ‘instant_unstake’ or ‘unstake’
   • Normal Staking: Method_Name = ’withdraw_unstaked’

After that we have calculated the actual $NEAR balance of each user by the above methodology, I am going to:

• Calculate the Total Number of $NEAR Holders

• Calculate The Average, Median & Maximum $NEAR Balance of Holders & Their Distribution By Their Held $NEAR.

• Identify The Top 20 $NEAR Holders (And Also With Excluding Custodial & Exchange Wallet Addresses) = $NEAR Whales

  • Excluded Wallets are Centralized Exchanges such as Binance & Kucoin, Staking Pools & Validators, NEAR Programs & Similar Individuals.

• Analyze The Activity of These "NEAR Whales” Within the NEAR Protocol

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According to the above data, there are currently 18.7M unique NEAR users who are holding $NEAR in their wallets. The average $NEAR balance of these wallets is 84 $NEAR and the median amount is 0.05 $NEAR. The maximum amount held $NEAR by a wallet is 55.6M $NEAR.

On the pie charts, we can see more than 98% of $NEAR holders are only holding less than 1 $NEAR in their wallets! Excluding these low-$NEAR-balance users and among other wallets, almost 52% of them are holding 1 - 10 $NEAR in their wallet followed by 33.6% of users who are holding 10 - 100 $NEAR in their wallet. Currently, there are only 3829 NEAR users who are holding more than 10,000 $NEAR in their wallet.

On the left chart, we can see that Binance Cold Wallet is by far holding the highest amount of $NEAR with more than 55.6M of this token. Ths second wallet with the highest amount of held $NEAR is 2cb04b0ca42cae381caf2baf80ed93ecd361d0c7e90ef6821c42e70c08276ed1 which is holding almost 28M $NEAR. So, Binance (as the top $NEAR holder) is holding almost 2x more $NEAR than the second whale of $NEAR token.

Totally, we can see the majority of these holders are staking pools & $NEAR validators.

Top 20 $NEAR Holders (Whales) Which Are Non-Custodial & Non-Exchanges

As mentioned earlier, in this part, I have excluded custodial & exchange addresses (as much as I could to identify them!) and then, analyzed their activity within NEAR protocol.

$NEAR Holders

After excluding the custodial and exchange addresses, we can see the wallet address 2cb04b0ca42cae381caf2baf80ed93ecd361d0c7e90ef6821c42e70c08276ed1 (which was on the second rank of previous all-wallets ranking) is the most worthy $NEAR whale which is holding more than 28M $NEAR.

The second & third $NEAR whales are the wallet addresses a778de7fc42034af1c85cac901fd40392dfc1cc69c3a688ea149112f57b0063e and c6d39aa078dbcba02800d1251194d33dbea2122d671435ac1c6ed5ffae383c03 which are holding 21M & 20M $NEAR in their wallets.

The difference between these 3 top whales and other whales is kinda big. on the pie-chart, we can see these 3 top whales have almost 55% of total held $NEAR by these top 20 whales.

According to the left chart, we can see the wallet address d73888a2619c7761735f23c798536145dfa87f9306b5f21275eb4b1a7ba971b9 is the oldest $NEAR whale with 124 Weeks age.

There are also 2 whales who have only 6 Weeks age and this is interesting that they are among the top 20 $NEAR whales while they are still so young compared to the other Whales!

On the above charts, we can see the over-time activity of $NEAR whales within NEAR protocol. As we see, the highest peak of these Whales’ activity on NEAR protocol was during the last months of the year 2022 and totally, their activity has increased dramatically over time especially after May 2022 when Terra collapse happened.

The interesting thing is that there is not a single day that more than 9 of these whales have been active on NEAR protocol. And we can see there are only 2 weeks that 9 of these top 20 whales have performed transactions on NEAR protocol.

Also, the highest activity of these whales (by number of transactions) have achieved during November 2022 (during the FTX & Alameda Collapse).

On the area-chart, we can see the activity of each $NEAR whale on this chain over time and as we see, 5c33c6218d47e00ef229f60da78d0897e1ee9665312550b8afd5f9c7bc6957d2 is by far the most active $NEAR whale within this chain in almost all days which its high activity has mainly begun since May 2022 (after Terra Collapse) followed by the wallet address ccb91e1db61e8d7e1d4ae3e043001140132959a86ee35a548b6563a46284a6ea which its main activity has begun since September 2022.

On the left chart, we can see the top popular destinations of each $NEAR whale (destinations that they have interacted with them more than others).

As we see, there are various popular destinations among these whales but we can kinda say that staking pools (for example, Figment.Pool which is the top popular destination of 3 whales) are the most common destinations of these whales and we can see these top 20 whales are hanging out within NEAR staking pools.

Also, we can see the wallet addresses of centralized exchanges such as Kucoin & OKX among the popular destinations of these whales.

On the above charts, we can see the emitted events ands actions by these top 20 $NEAR whales in both terms of number of transactions and also number of whales that have emitted them.

As we see, Fungible Token Transfer (FT_Transfer) is by far the most popular method emitted by these whales followed by Storage_Deposit and On_Stake_Action (in terms of number of transactions). But in terms of number of users, we can see on_stake_action and also Deposit_And_Stake are the 2 most popular emitted methods by these whales. So, we can see another proof to the popularity of Stake actions among these $NEAR whales.

In terms of actions done by these users, we can also see Transfer, Stake and Function Call are the 3 most popular actions done by these whales.

In the left charts, we can see the top popular destinations of $NEAR whales on each month over time.

As we see, in terms of number of transactions, Binance deposit wallet, Cookiemonster.near, Huobi Deposit Wallet, Kucoin Deposit Wallet and Sweat Token (especially during the recent months) are the most popular destinations.

In terms of number of users, we can see the dominance of centralized exchanges wallets such as OKX, Kucoin, Gate.io, Huobi & Binance over other destinations.

Also, we can see popularity of staking pools within these destinations.

The interesting thing about these top $NEAR whales is that majority of them have a very low activity within this protocol. As we see, the wallet address 5c33c6218d47e00ef229f60da78d0897e1ee9665312550b8afd5f9c7bc6957d2 is the most active $NEAR whales in NEAR protocl that have performed more than 183k transactions in this chain! The second & 3rd most active $NEAR whales are d73888a2619c7761735f23c798536145dfa87f9306b5f21275eb4b1a7ba971b9 and ccb91e1db61e8d7e1d4ae3e043001140132959a86ee35a548b6563a46284a6ea that have performed almost 63k & 53k transactions within this chain.

The 4th active $NEAR whale is eb3c2bfd6bf357f433be30292d78b23f948ee75f63baca2cc5f56cff1751c294 which have performed 6374 transactions followed by the wallet address abbgs8yhdyhw1238.near with 321 transactions in NEAR protocol. The other wallets have less than 20 performed transactions on NEAR protocol which shows the low activity of them in this chain.

Also, we can see the number of active days of majority of $NEAR whales within NEAR protocol is also low and there are only 4 wallets who were actively performing transactions in NEAR protocol and the other 6 have totally been active for less than 35 days in this chain !

Moreover, we can see that 3 of these 20 $NEAR whales have not performed any transactions on NEAR protocol and this means they have only received $NEAR tokens and did not do any transactions within this chain.

In terms of number of transactions, we can see SWEAT token is by far the most popular destination of $NEAR whales (which we have seen it was the most popular destination of the whale with wallet address ccb91e1db61e8d7e1d4ae3e043001140132959a86ee35a548b6563a46284a6ea) with more than 20.312k interactions followed by the CookieMonster.near with 6856 transactions and OKEX (centralized exchange) deposit wallet on the 3rd rank with 6158 interactions.

But in terms of number of users (whales) we can see OKEX deposit wallet is the destination that 5 of these 20 whales have interacted with it. on the next rank, we can see some destinations such as Kucoin Deposit Wallet, Huboi Deposit Wallet, Gaie.io Deposit Wallet, Coinbase Deposit Wallet among the most popular destinations of these whales.

Summary and Conclusion

• There are more than 18.5M unique $NEAR holders that the majority of them are holding less than 1 $NEAR in their wallet. The median held $NEAR by these users is 0.05 $NEAR while the average held $NEAR is 84.

• There are almost 3829 wallets who are holding more than 10,000 $NEAR.

• The highest amount of $NEAR is being held by Binance Cold Wallet (55.6M $NEAR) with a big difference from other wallets (2x more than the second rank wallet).

• After excluding non-custodial & non-exchanges wallets, the wallet address 2cb04b0ca42cae381caf2baf80ed93ecd361d0c7e90ef6821c42e70c08276ed1 is the top $NEAR holder (2nd $NEAR holder of all-wallets) with 28M balance.

• The majority of top 20 $NEAR whales were not much active in NEAR protocol since they have performed low number of transactions and also were active in less than 20 days within this chain.

• The activity of top 20 $NEAR whales is increasing as time goes and and the highest peak of their activity was during the last 3-4 months of the year 2022. The highest activity of these whales has been achieved during November (FTX Collapse).

• $NEAR Staking Pools (such as Figment) and Centralized Exchanges (such as OKX, Kucoin, Coinbase, Binance) were the most popular destinations of $NEAR whales. So, we can say these whales are hanging out in these destinations more than other places.

• Token Transfers and Staking Actions were the 2 most popular actions done by These top $NEAR Whales.

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