During Paris Blockchain Week, BeInCrypto conducted an exclusive interview with Aleksandr Vat, Head of Business Development at Ethplorer.io, to explore the company’s newly launched Aggregated Ethereum Rich List.
Ethplorer contends that conventional Ethereum rich lists have grown increasingly deceptive because they rank wallets solely based on ETH holdings. The new ranking instead evaluates the total USD value held by each address, factoring in ETH, ERC-20 tokens, and stablecoins.
Photo provided by Aleksandr Vat
According to Vat, this shift reshapes the understanding of Ethereum wealth, liquidity, and risk. It also leads to one of Ethplorer’s more striking conclusions: altseason may have already occurred, but on balance sheets rather than in price charts.
Ethereum’s Rich List Has Changed
BeInCrypto: At the conference, you shared the new Ethereum ranking with the community. Can you explain what the Aggregated Ethereum Rich List is and why Ethplorer created it?
Aleksandr Vat: Ethplorer reconstructed the Ethereum rich list by ranking addresses based on total USD value rather than ETH alone. This encompasses ETH, ERC-20 tokens, and stablecoins.
The Aggregated Ranking of Ethereum addresses relies on totalBalanceUsd, in contrast to traditional rankings sorted by ethBalanceUsd. The motivation was straightforward: ETH-only rankings no longer reflect the true economic power on Ethereum.
BeInCrypto: What was fundamentally flawed about traditional ETH-based rankings?
Aleksandr Vat: ETH-only rankings overlook the majority of capital. Currently, around 66% of value resides outside ETH, primarily in tokens and stablecoins. This means ETH-based lists present a skewed picture of who holds liquidity and risk.
BeInCrypto: What stood out most when you first reconstructed the ranking?
Aleksandr Vat: The most dramatic shift was that the entire hierarchy was reshuffled. The same top 10,000 addresses hold nearly three times more capital when tokens are included. Many participants that were previously nearly invisible suddenly emerged as dominant players.
Ethereum Is Becoming Entity-Centric
BeInCrypto: Vitalik Buterin envisioned Ethereum as a platform where code manages value. Has that vision come to fruition?
Aleksandr Vat: Increasingly, it is systems rather than individuals. Smart contracts, exchanges, and liquidity hubs now command a significant share of capital. Ethereum has shifted from being whale-centric to entity-centric.
What matters is that we can now quantify this. In ETH-based rankings, this transformation was nearly undetectable. Once we examine aggregated balances, it becomes evident that a substantial share of capital is already governed by smart contracts, DeFi protocols, bridges, and liquidity pools. Approximately 28% of total capital is now managed by these systems.
So this is no longer merely a vision. It is an observable structural reality.
“Altseason Already Happened”
BeInCrypto: You claim that “altseason already happened.” What do you mean by that?
Aleksandr Vat: Altseason did not vanish. It migrated from price charts to balance sheets.
Throughout most of 2017–2021, ETH represented the bulk of Ethereum’s economic value, while tokens and stablecoins played supporting roles.
That structure has since shifted. By 2022–2023, token-denominated balances had caught up to ETH in economic weight.
In Ethereum’s Aggregated Rating 2026, ETH no longer dominates portfolios. The top 10,000 addresses held roughly $342 billion in total value at the end of March 2026. Of that sum, $116.5 billion was held in ETH, equivalent to about 34%, while the remaining 66% was denominated in tokens.
BeInCrypto: Why did the market overlook this?
Aleksandr Vat: Because people monitor prices, not balance composition. While charts remained flat, capital was quietly redistributing across tokens, stablecoins, and smart contracts.
BeInCrypto: Are we witnessing a different kind of market cycle now?
Aleksandr Vat: Yes. The market is transitioning from price discovery to power discovery. The central question is less “What is the price?” and more “Who controls liquidity and risk?”
What This Means for Investors and Analysts
BeInCrypto: What practical value does this offer investors?
Aleksandr Vat: It transforms how you assess risk. Rather than concentrating solely on price or market cap, you examine what a balance is composed of. Is it genuine external capital, or is it self-issued tokens?
BeInCrypto: How should analysts adjust their approach using this data?
Aleksandr Vat: Analysts need to shift from narratives to composition analysis. That means examining aggregated balances, capital sources, and dependencies, rather than focusing only on TVL or token price.
BeInCrypto: Does this change how we should interpret TVL and market cap?
Aleksandr Vat: Yes. Both metrics can be distorted by self-issued tokens. Without understanding balance composition, you risk overestimating real economic strength.
The Printing-Press Index
BeInCrypto: What is the Printing-Press Index, and why did you introduce it?
Aleksandr Vat: The Printing-Press Index, or PPI, measures how much of a portfolio consists of a project’s own token. It helps distinguish real capital from internally generated value.
The formula is straightforward:
PPI equals the USD value of a project’s own tokens divided by the total USD value of tokens held by the project. In essence, it reveals the proportion of a project’s own token within its portfolio.
BeInCrypto: What did PPI uncover about DeFi, centralized exchanges, bridges, and Layer 2 networks?
Aleksandr Vat: DeFi shows a significantly higher dependence on self-issued tokens compared to centralized players. On average, it is roughly twice as high, at 14.7% versus 6.9%.
Bridges and Layer 2s exhibit even higher PPI, around 34.8%. Part of this is structural, as they often require native tokens for liquidity and staking. But this also shifts risk toward token price dependency.
BeInCrypto: At what point does PPI become dangerous?
Aleksandr Vat: Below roughly 20%, it is considered normal. Above 40% to 50%, the system becomes fragile and vulnerable to reflexive collapse dynamics.
BeInCrypto: Can you provide real-world examples of high PPI risk?
Aleksandr Vat: UST-LUNA is the extreme case. The system was almost entirely backed by its own token, which triggered a death spiral.
FTX is another example. Even around 40% exposure to FTT was sufficient to trigger collapse under stress. This demonstrates that high PPI does not need to become extreme to pose a serious danger.
ETH Still Matters, But It’s No Longer the Full Picture
BeInCrypto: Is ETH still at the heart of Ethereum’s economy?
Aleksandr Vat: ETH remains significant, but it is no longer the primary reserve asset in large portfolios. Only about 34% of top-holder wealth is held in ETH. The remaining 66% sits outside ETH, spread across tokens.
BeInCrypto: What caught you off guard most when looking at address behavior?
Aleksandr Vat: The generational shift. The majority of large addresses in the Aggregated Ranking are considerably newer, which points to capital flowing in through DeFi and tokens.
In the ETH-only top ranking, roughly one-third of wallets are over five years old. In the Aggregated Ranking, nearly 60% are less than two years old.
Aggregated addresses are also roughly 25% more active. They exhibit larger balance swings and greater volatility because they capture genuine liquidity movement, rather than passive ETH accumulation.
Weeding Out Illusory Token Wealth
BeInCrypto: How do you handle fake or inflated token balances?
Aleksandr Vat: We use liquidity filters. This means leaving out balances that cannot realistically be sold without significantly impacting the market.
Without such filtering, low-liquidity tokens can artificially boost rankings and give a distorted view of true economic influence. In crypto, it is fairly straightforward to create a token, assign it a price through minimal trading, and fabricate the appearance of large holdings.
To tackle this, we run a series of validation checks. We examine minimum trading volume, both recent and historical. We verify market cap consistency and evaluate whether a balance could realistically be liquidated on the open market.
The reasoning is straightforward. If you cannot realistically offload your entire position within roughly two weeks, that balance does not represent genuine liquid capital and should not skew the ranking.
The Beacon Deposit Contract Issue
BeInCrypto: Before this conversation, we reviewed conventional Ethereum rich lists from well-known platforms. One thing jumped out immediately. The Beacon Deposit Contract appears to hold close to 70% of the Ethereum network. Are we truly only analyzing the behavior of the remaining 30% of the market?
Aleksandr Vat: That is precisely the flaw with ETH-only rankings. They paint a distorted picture.
The Beacon contract is not an actual holder. It is a technical deposit ledger for staking. The ETH locked there is not controlled by any single party and cannot even be withdrawn from that address.
So when it shows up as “70% of the market,” roughly 83 million ETH, it does not reflect real economic clout or market activity. It is a technical artifact.
If you look at the actual picture, active staking is closer to 39 million ETH. When we shift to an aggregated perspective, including liquid tokens and stablecoins, active staking makes up just over 10% of total ecosystem capital.
So we are not analyzing only 30% of the market. About 10% is locked in staking. The other 90% is where the market truly operates, where capital shifts, trades, and redistributes across the ecosystem.
Constructing the Ranking
BeInCrypto: How long did it take to build this ranking?
Aleksandr Vat: There is no single timeline because this was not developed as an isolated project. Ethplorer has spent years processing token-level data, with a focus on USD valuation and weeding out low-quality assets.
At a certain point, the data quality and coverage reached a threshold where constructing a comprehensive aggregated ranking became feasible. That is when we shaped it into a structured product.
BeInCrypto: What was the most challenging part?
Aleksandr Vat: Data cleanup, particularly dealing with spam tokens, price discrepancies, and entity consolidation.
BeInCrypto: What kind of community response have you seen?
Aleksandr Vat: Strong engagement and debate, largely because the ranking challenges widely held assumptions about Ethereum.
BeInCrypto: Did you discuss this with industry figures at Paris Blockchain Week?
Aleksandr Vat: Yes, and reactions ranged from curiosity to skepticism. That is to be expected when you introduce a new analytical framework.
Key Takeaway
BeInCrypto: What is the central insight from your research?
Aleksandr Vat: Ethereum’s rich list is no longer about wealth. It is about capital flows and how risk is distributed.
BeInCrypto: If you had to distill the shift into a single sentence?
Aleksandr Vat: We moved from simply tracking balances to truly understanding capital structure.
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