At Paris Blockchain Week, BeInCrypto sat down for an exclusive interview with Aleksandr Vat, Head of Business Development at Ethplorer.io, to discuss the company’s new Aggregated Ethereum Rich List.
Ethplorer argues that traditional Ethereum rich lists have become increasingly misleading because they rank wallets by ETH holdings alone. Its new ranking looks at the total USD value held by each address, including ETH, ERC-20 tokens, and stablecoins.
Photo provided by Aleksandr Vat
According to Vat, this changes the picture of Ethereum wealth, liquidity, and risk. It also leads to one of Ethplorer’s more provocative conclusions: altseason may have already happened, but in balance sheets rather than price charts.
Ethereum’s Rich List Has Changed
BeInCrypto: At the conference, you discussed the new Ethereum ranking with the community. What is the Aggregated Ethereum Rich List, and why did Ethplorer build it?
Aleksandr Vat: Ethplorer rebuilt the Ethereum rich list by ranking addresses not only by ETH, but by total USD value. That includes ETH, ERC-20 tokens, and stablecoins.
The Aggregated Ranking of Ethereum addresses is based on totalBalanceUsd, unlike traditional rankings, which are sorted by ethBalanceUsd. The goal was simple. ETH-only rankings no longer show real economic power on Ethereum.
BeInCrypto: What was fundamentally wrong with traditional ETH-based rankings?
Aleksandr Vat: ETH-only rankings ignore most of the capital. Today, around 66% of value sits outside ETH, mostly in tokens and stablecoins. That means ETH-based lists give a distorted view of who controls liquidity and risk.
BeInCrypto: What was the biggest insight when you first rebuilt the ranking?
Aleksandr Vat: The biggest change was that the entire hierarchy changed. The same top 10,000 addresses hold almost three times more capital when tokens are included. Many players that were previously almost invisible suddenly become dominant.
Ethereum Is Becoming Entity-Centric
BeInCrypto: Vitalik Buterin envisioned Ethereum as a platform where code manages value. Has that vision been realized?
Aleksandr Vat: Increasingly, it is systems rather than individuals. Smart contracts, exchanges, and liquidity hubs now control a large share of capital. Ethereum has become less whale-centric and more entity-centric.
What is important is that we can now measure it. In ETH-based rankings, this change was almost invisible. Once we look at aggregated balances, it becomes clear that a large share of capital is already controlled by smart contracts, DeFi protocols, bridges, and liquidity pools. Roughly 28% of total capital is now controlled by these systems.
So this is no longer only a vision. It is an observable structural reality.
“Altseason Already Happened”
BeInCrypto: You say that “altseason already happened.” What do you mean by that?
Aleksandr Vat: Altseason did not disappear. It moved from price charts to balance sheets.
Through most of 2017–2021, ETH represented the majority of Ethereum’s economic value, while tokens and stablecoins played secondary roles.
That structure has since changed. By 2022–2023, token-denominated balances had matched ETH in economic weight.
In Ethereum’s Aggregated Rating 2026, ETH no longer dominates portfolios. The top 10,000 addresses held about $342 billion in total value at the end of March 2026. Of this amount, $116.5 billion was held in ETH, equal to roughly 34%, while the remaining 66% was denominated in tokens.
BeInCrypto: Why did the market miss this?
Aleksandr Vat: Because people watch prices, not balance composition. While charts were flat, capital was quietly redistributing across tokens, stablecoins, and smart contracts.
BeInCrypto: Are we looking at a different kind of market cycle now?
Aleksandr Vat: Yes. The market is going from price discovery to power discovery. The key question is less “What is the price?” and more “Who controls liquidity and risk?”
What This Means for Investors and Analysts
BeInCrypto: What does this give investors in practice?
Aleksandr Vat: It changes how you evaluate risk. Instead of focusing only on price or market cap, you look at what a balance consists of. Is it real external capital, or is it self-issued tokens?
BeInCrypto: How should analysts rethink their approach using this data?
Aleksandr Vat: Analysts need to move from narratives to composition analysis. That means looking at aggregated balances, capital sources, and dependencies, rather than only 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 can overestimate 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 separate real capital from internally generated value.
The formula is simple:
PPI equals the USD value of a project’s own tokens divided by the total USD value of tokens held by the project. In other words, it shows the share of a project’s own token in its portfolio.
BeInCrypto: What did PPI reveal about DeFi, centralized exchanges, bridges, and Layer 2 networks?
Aleksandr Vat: DeFi shows significantly higher reliance on self-issued tokens compared with centralized players. On average, it is around twice as high, 14.7% versus 6.9%.
Bridges and Layer 2s show even higher PPI, around 34.8%. Part of this is structural because they often require native tokens for liquidity and staking. But this also transfers risk toward token price dependency.
BeInCrypto: At what point does PPI become risky?
Aleksandr Vat: Below roughly 20%, it is normal. Above 40% to 50%, the system becomes fragile and exposed to reflexive collapse dynamics.
BeInCrypto: Can you give 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 led to a death spiral.
FTX is another example. Even around 40% exposure to FTT was enough to trigger collapse under stress. That shows high PPI does not need to be extreme to become dangerous.
ETH Is Still Important, But It Is No Longer the Whole Story
BeInCrypto: Does ETH still represent the core of Ethereum’s economy?
Aleksandr Vat: ETH is still important, but it is no longer the dominant store of value within large portfolios. Only around 34% of top-holder capital is in ETH. The other 66% sits outside ETH, in tokens.
BeInCrypto: What surprised you most in terms of address dynamics?
Aleksandr Vat: The generational change. Most large addresses in the Aggregated Ranking are significantly newer, which reflects capital entering through DeFi and tokens.
In the ETH top ranking, about one-third of wallets are more than five years old. In the Aggregated Ranking, almost 60% are under two years old.
Aggregated addresses are also about 25% more active. They show larger balance changes and higher volatility because they reflect real liquidity flows, rather than passive ETH holding.
Filtering Out Fake Token Wealth
BeInCrypto: How do you deal with fake or inflated token balances?
Aleksandr Vat: We apply liquidity filters. That means excluding balances that cannot realistically be sold without moving the market.
Without filtering, low-liquidity tokens can artificially inflate rankings and misrepresent real economic power. In crypto, it is relatively easy to mint a token, assign it a price through thin trading, and create the illusion of large balances.
To address this, we use a set of validation checks. We look at minimum trading activity, both current and historical. We validate market capitalization consistency and assess whether a balance could realistically be liquidated in the market.
The logic is simple. If you cannot realistically sell your full position within about two weeks, that balance does not represent real liquid capital and should not distort the ranking.
The Beacon Deposit Contract Problem
BeInCrypto: Before this interview, we looked at traditional Ethereum rich lists from well-known platforms. One thing immediately stood out. The Beacon Deposit Contract appears to hold nearly 70% of the Ethereum network. Are we really analyzing the behavior of only the remaining 30% of the market?
Aleksandr Vat: That is exactly the problem with ETH-only rankings. They create a misleading picture.
The Beacon contract is not a real holder. It is a technical deposit registry for staking. The ETH there is not controlled by a single entity and cannot even be withdrawn from that address.
So when it shows up as “70% of the market,” around 83 million ETH, it does not reflect real economic power or market behavior. It is a technical figure.
If you look at the real picture, active staking is closer to 39 million ETH. When we move to an aggregated view, including liquid tokens and stablecoins, active staking accounts for just over 10% of total ecosystem capital.
So we are not analyzing only 30% of the market. Roughly 10% sits in staking. The other 90% is where the market actually operates, where capital moves, trades, and redistributes across the ecosystem.
Building the Ranking
BeInCrypto: How long did it take to develop this ranking?
Aleksandr Vat: There is no single timeline because this was not built as a standalone project. Ethplorer has spent years processing token-level data, focusing on USD valuation and filtering out low-quality assets.
At some point, the data quality and coverage reached a level where building a full aggregated ranking became possible. That is when we turned it into a structured product.
BeInCrypto: What was the hardest part?
Aleksandr Vat: Cleaning the data, especially handling spam tokens, price inconsistencies, and entity aggregation.
BeInCrypto: What kind of feedback have you received from the community?
Aleksandr Vat: Strong interest and debate, especially because the ranking challenges widely accepted assumptions about Ethereum.
BeInCrypto: Have you discussed this with industry players at Paris Blockchain Week?
Aleksandr Vat: Yes, and reactions were mixed, from curiosity to skepticism. That is expected when you introduce a new analytical approach.
Final Takeaway
BeInCrypto: What is the main takeaway from your research?
Aleksandr Vat: Ethereum’s rich list is no longer about wealth. It is about capital flows and risk distribution.
BeInCrypto: If you had to summarize the change in one sentence?Aleksandr Vat: We went from tracking balances to understanding capital structure.
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