Where did the SOL tokens go? The hidden map of the supply of 605 million tokens

2025-07-24 11:15:29

Collection

Where is the SOL giant whale hiding?

Author: Ignas

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

This is a simple question that arises from curiosity. Last year, I wrote an article about "Where Did the Ethereum Tokens Go." Later, @0xEekeyguy created a great public dashboard to query the distribution of Ethereum tokens.

So, what about SOL?

Where is SOL Hidden?

Disclaimer: This article is still being refined. I need everyone's help to verify the data and provide new information about the current status of SOL and its ownership.

88% of the total supply of SOL is in circulation.

Source: https://solanacompass.com/tokenomics, https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/

Solana has no upper limit on total supply, with a current inflation rate of 4.395%, decreasing by 15% each year. The final inflation rate is expected to stabilize at 1.5%.

Source: https://www.helius.dev/blog/solana-staking-simplified-guide-to-sol-staking

Notably, 71% of the circulating supply of SOL is actively staked, while the corresponding figure for ETH is 30%.

Source: https://solscan.io/analysis/solana_staking

However, according to data from Solanacompass.com, 6.7% of this staked amount is locked SOL (held by venture capital, insiders, and the team)?

Source: https://solanacompass.com/tokenomics

Yet, I find it difficult to determine what these locked tokens are and who owns them.

According to Messari's data, 99.88% of SOL tokens have been unlocked. The only "locked" tokens are the 600,000 SOL held by FTX (which may have been sold through over-the-counter transactions).

Source: https://solana.messari.io/token-unlocks

So, what are the 11.2% of locked tokens reported by Solanacompass and CoinMarketCap? It remains unclear.

Who Holds SOL?

According to data from Arkham Intelligence, Coinbase holds $5 billion worth of SOL, accounting for 4.7% of the total supply of SOL.

Source: https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/token/solana

Here are other major holders sorted by their share of circulating supply:

Binance------3.97%
Jito------1.61%
Upbit------1.28%
OKx------1.19%
Alameda------0.92% (possibly belongs to the locked tokens marked by Messari?)
Marinade Finance------0.79%
Robinhood------0.74%
Kraken------0.53%
Bybit------0.49%
Jump Crypto------0.33%
Crypto.com------0.33%
Wintermute------0.14%
Bitstamp------0.13%

Overall, the top holders accounted for over 20% of the circulating supply, which is a decent figure.

We can also find more relevant institutions by querying staking entities on Dune.

Source: https://dune.com/thedefireport/solana-staking-and-validators

In addition to the aforementioned institutions (Binance, Coinbase), we also see that Helius holds 2.5% of the active staked supply.

Galaxy holds a significant amount of SOL, totaling 8.8 million, along with institutions like Ledger, Figment, Kiln1, Everstake, and others.

Many top wallets have yet to be tagged for ownership.

To achieve network decentralization, the Solana Foundation has delegated 35.6 million SOL (6.6% of the circulating supply) to 542 validators.

According to @0xEekeyguy, validators need to stake at least 50,000 to 75,000 SOL to be profitable.

Surprisingly, only 14.3% of staked SOL comes from liquid staking tokens (LST) (10.5% of the circulating supply). Jito is leading in this area.

This limits the growth potential of DeFi on Solana. If a few more percentage points of native staked SOL were to shift to LST, the scale of Solana's DeFi ecosystem could increase by billions of dollars.

Individual Holders

Disclaimer: I attempted to estimate the number of individual holders by analyzing data through artificial intelligence, which is likely inaccurate.

According to this experimental data, the amount of SOL held by 120 wallets is equivalent to the total holdings of 8.9 million users who hold less than 1,000 SOL.

The average balance of SOL wallets is: 16.8 SOL (influenced by small holders, the data may be skewed).

Overall:

Concentration: 0.33% of wallets (30,220) control 54% of the SOL supply (but this includes centralized exchanges, custodians, etc.).
Retail dominance: 97.4% of wallets hold less than 1,000 SOL, collectively holding 24.8% of the supply.