Top Holders of ERC20 Tokens
In last week's article on token holder distribution, @eeks pointed out the value of teasing out the exchange addresses, especially those that are bigger holders. I put that in the back of my mind until I refreshed the First Blood token holders chart today and saw their Top 100 accounts had gone from 76% to 90% of First tokens...in five days! And there is one holder with 36% of all the tokens.
Turns out that big holder is Yunbi. Surprisingly, this top holder's amounts didn't change in the last week, but it still skews my impressions from last week.
Here's the next question I have: is this unusual? 36% of all tokens is a huge amount for one exchange. Or is it?
Let's look at Golem, because it has been around about as long as First Blood has. Golem has remained steady with the top 100 holders owning 78% of GNT. The top holder has 17.5% of GNT. Let's take a look at the account and see if we can determine if it's an exchange. 
This account holds only Golem (Neverdie has been passing out free tokens so we'll ignore them), all from the Poloniex-GNT account. Either it's a whale who owns $85 million in GNT, or it's a cold wallet owned by Poloniex. I'm not sure if there is a way to see if Poloniex owns that much GNT, but if you know, please mention it in the comments.
As for other tokens, Bittrex is the largest holder of SWT, RLC and ANT, owning 25%, 15%, and 17% respectively. They also top the Trustcoin holders list at 23% and are in the top five for many tokens. To answer my question above, yes 36% is a massive amount of tokens for one exchange.
Finally, what do we do with this data? At this time, I don't really know-I do think information can be gleaned by following token movements closely and looking for correlations with price, but I lack the programming and data science chops to do it. Is it a problem that there is a ton of First Blood tokens available through Yunbi? Consider this article a starting point for the curious and if you do know a way to make use of this knowledge, I'd love to see it in the comments!
I think you're on to something here. I was doing some brainstorming just last night and had the idea to monitor the exchange accounts for large changes in incoming transaction volume, with big increases in a short amount of time indicating that someone is likely getting ready to dump a bunch of coins. This would be done programmatically of course. DM me @deelawn on coinfund slack if you'd be interested in collaborating.
Is there a correlation between big token moves and big price movements?
Front running a massive purchase/sell would be great; I've read Flash Boys and saw the effects of this.
Will be interesting to see this play out in crypto. Will dark pools become popular?
I just put a little ETH into Rialto.ai to take advantage of their arbitrage and market making plan; I think they're the best bet going forward. I'd be happy to follow your efforts as well.
I also invested a bit into Rialto for the same reasons. I don't see many good reasons why someone would move a large quantity of tokens to an exchange if they don't plan to sell. It's possible they could be using it as collateral for short positions or loaning it out on Poloniex, but a sale seems far more likely. I'm going to write a script to monitor such moves and their results in the coming months. I'll make a post with my findings.
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