Ethplorer: Altseason Has Already Happened

At Paris Blockchain Week, Aleksandr Vat, head of business development at Ethplorer, presented the Aggregated Ethereum Rich List, a ranking that totals USD value across ETH, ERC‑20 tokens and stablecoins. Ethplorer used a metric called totalBalanceUsd to combine holdings. At the end of March 2026 the top 10,000 addresses held about $342 billion in aggregate value; $116.5 billion, or roughly 34%, was in ETH and the remaining 66% was in tokens and stablecoins.

Vat argued that lists ranked by ETH alone no longer reflect economic control on Ethereum. The Beacon Deposit Contract appears in ETH-only rankings as holding about 83 million ETH, but that address functions as a staking registry and its funds cannot be withdrawn from that contract. Ethplorer’s aggregated view, which filters for liquid token balances, estimates active staking represents just over 10% of total ecosystem capital.

The Aggregated Ranking also shows capital is increasingly controlled by systems rather than long‑held individual wallets. Ethplorer found about 28% of total capital is held by smart contracts, DeFi protocols, bridges and liquidity pools. Nearly 60% of the largest aggregated addresses are under two years old, and these aggregated addresses show about 25% more activity and higher balance volatility than ETH-only top holders. When token holdings are included, the same top 10,000 addresses hold nearly three times more capital.

To separate internal token issuance from external capital, Ethplorer introduced the Printing-Press Index, or PPI. The PPI measures the share of a portfolio that consists of a project’s own token. Ethplorer reports average PPI values of about 14.7% for DeFi protocols, 6.9% for centralized platforms and 34.8% for bridges and Layer 2 networks.

Vat cautioned that a PPI below roughly 20% is common, while levels above 40 to 50% increase fragility and exposure to reflexive collapse. He cited past failures, including the UST‑LUNA collapse and losses tied to FTT exposure at FTX, as examples of token-backed fragility.

Ethplorer applies liquidity filters and validation checks to avoid counting inflated or illiquid token balances. The firm screens for minimum trading activity, checks market capitalization consistency and assesses whether a full position could be sold within about two weeks without materially moving the market. Vat identified data cleaning, spam tokens and aggregating related addresses as the most difficult parts of building the product.

Vat said analysts and investors should focus less on price charts and more on balance composition and who controls liquidity and risk. He summarized the work as a shift from tracking nominal balances to analyzing capital structure.