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Dogecoin (DOGE) is one of the most popular digital currencies around today, especially for its meme status and its affiliation with Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. As a cryptocurrency with its own public blockchain, Dogecoin is paraded as a decentralized network; however, a review of its top wallet addresses by U.Today proved otherwise.
Drawing on data from CoinMarketCap, the top 10 wallet Dogecoin addresses currently hold a total of 48.02% of the coin's supply. Dogecoin's total supply, according to on-chain data, is pegged at 132,670,764,300 units, and the biggest holder controls exactly 25.28% of this number.
Of the total addresses on the network, which comes in at 4,508,886, the top 20 wallets control 54.76% of the supply, while the top 50 addresses hold 62.96% of the supply. This negates the idea of decentralization that seeks to distribute the token uniformly to as many of the wallet holders as possible.
To give a better overview of the centralization of Dogecoin, Bitcoin's top 10 wallet addresses control just a total of 5.38% of the coin's current total supply of 19,247,075. Also, the top 100 coins for BTC hold just 13.51% of the supply, against 67.55% for the meme coin.
Susceptibility to price manipulation
One of the major dangers of supply centralization for a digital currency is its susceptibility to price manipulation. The biggest holders of Dogecoin can significantly impact the price of the coin when they offload their bags and can enhance the pump-and-dump narrative that DOGE is known for.
While the centralization concern is a major one for Dogecoin, community members have been requesting that the coin switch to the proof-of-stake (PoS) model like Ethereum, a transition rumor that U.Today reported to have been refuted by one of the cryptocurrency's lead developers.
At the time of writing, DOGE is trading at $0.06783, down 4.29% in the past 24 hours.
Alex Dovbnya
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov