Looking at the DAO Token Distribution: Part 2

WTF, Mate?!

Well boys and girls, we’ve done some things. If you’ve invested into The DAO, welcome to the largest crowdfunded/kickstarter/other “traditional analogy that doesn’t quite cut it” in history. The truth is, we’ve done something historical, and possibly game changing and foundational to how organizations pool and spend money (among other things). Let’s take some more time to look at who has invested, and how much has been put in, to see if we can draw some conclusions

In short: the more concise, truthful information that is put into more people’s hands results in more informed decisions. I speculate and draw my own conclusions, but the plots and numbers displayed herein are what they are — factual visualizations.

Of course, if you’ve got some sweet data chops yourself, all calculations and visualizations can be seen on my GitHub page. Take a look, let’s chat about it.

Basic assumptions

Because we don’t know all of the exchanges’ wallet addresses (at least I don’t, yet), we have to make a few assumptions of who they are based the number of transactions an address has and its total amount invested.

I have found tagged exchange addresses on EtherScan.io, cross referenced them against the DAO transactions, and they give the following information:

Exchange Ether invested Number of transactions

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Kraken 35522.70303 275

Gatecoin 194191.10361 843

Poloniex 697929.88320 5826

Ok, so it’s clear that Poloniex has the majority of DAO purchases, and they’re all associated with one address (that I know of). But other exchanges that I found in the data run quite a range. Considering these numbers, I tagged any address that had over 30k Ether invested and over 100 transactions as an “exchange.” This led to the following table of “exchanges” :

Five addresses end up contributing around 10% of the total Ether invested into The DAO. That’s a lot! Let’s take a moment to ponder the implications.

What does this mean?

When purchasing DAO tokens on an exchange, one has to enter extra specific information into a “data field,” so that the exchange knows where to send the tokens.

The required data field means that the exchange doesn’t hold the tokens; it only sends the Ether from a user’s account (assuming the user didn’t screw it up), and the respective tokens that are generated go to the provided off-exchange address provided in the data field.

Essentially, all tokens associated with exchange purchases are distributed amongst addresses that I can’t see. Although we can’t know for sure yet, it is reasonable to assume that this group of addresses possesses the same wealth distribution as the addresses we can see.

Namely, exchanges acting as platforms to purchase DAO tokens are not an issue, as they never control the tokens! During the creation phase, they’re only providing access points into the DAO, and are not acting as custodians of DAO tokens. Let’s take another look at wealth distribution, taking into account this new group, and see how it changes. Below is the same plot as the Part 1 blog post, but updated with the additional exchange group, and now we’re counting DAO tokens and not Ether because of the purchase rate changes.