The information was shared by Digital Assets Data, a fintech data company. Dai, built by MakerDAO, enables users to lend or produce the stablecoin by staking the holdings.
Dai is not pegged to reserve currencies but generated by placing Ether in a CDP smart contract.
Last November, the Dai stablecoin hit 100 million token debt limit and unveiled its multi-collateral Dai (MCD) that can be pegged to several assets.
The former, single-collateral Dai that was created only using Ether was christened as “sai”, while the fresh MCD came to be known as “Dai.”
CDPs for various assets were rebranded as “vaults”, implying Ether is held in Ether vault, while Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) are held in a BAT vault.
As per Digital Assets Data, roughly 155,000 CDPs were prompted on the earlier version of the Maker Protocol and 77% of those possessed less than 0.05ETH. Brandon Anderson, a data science lead at Digital Assets Data, said
“There is one address that maintains 27% of the value locked in CDP’s. Likewise, the new Vaults system has a similar distribution, with one address holding 15% of the value locked. As Maker continues to grow, we will see how these distributions play out and if there is more adoption within the lower bins.”
Anderson added that these addresses are not necessarily a single entity:
“It is possible that one or more of those addresses could be smart contracts that contain ETH as a part of MakerDAO, and do not represent a single entity. Without a significant amount of additional research, we cannot commit to singling out/identifying these addresses.”
He inferred that there could be whales having a control over huge quantity of locked Ether and the quantum of locked assets has grown over the years. However, he pointed out that such a position is not limited to anyone in particular.
More than 3,500 vaults have been set up using the latest system, majority of which possess over 1 Ether, as per Digital Assets Data.
Notably, last November, the number of Ether locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications hit a record high of 2.70 million, as per DeFi tracking resource DeFiPulse, and has been increasing consistently since June 2019 end.
DeFiPulse indicates that the total value of funds frozen in DeFi apps hit a high of $793.1 million (record high of 3.20 million ETH), of which more than 57% (~$453.50 million, a record high of 2.50 million ETH) is held in the MakerDAO network.