There are 605 million SOLs in circulation. Who holds them?

Circulating Supply: 605 million SOL tokens are in circulation, with 99.88% unlocked according to Messari. Only 600,000 SOL held by FTX may still be locked (possibly sold via OTC).
Staking: 71% of circulating SOL is staked (vs. 30% for ETH), but 6.7% of staked SOL is reportedly locked (VCs, insiders, team). Discrepancy exists with Solanacompass data showing 11.2% locked.
Major Holders:
- Coinbase holds 4.7% ($5B worth), Binance 3.97%, Jito 1.61%, Upbit 1.28%, and Alameda 0.92% (possibly locked).
- Top holders (exchanges, institutions) control over 20% of supply. Helius (2.5% staked), Galaxy (8.8M SOL), and others like Ledger, Figment are notable.
Decentralization Efforts: Solana Foundation delegated 35.6M SOL (6.6% of supply) to 542 validators. Validators need 50K–75K SOL stakes to be profitable.
Liquid Staking: Only 14.3% of staked SOL is in Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs), limiting DeFi growth potential. Jito leads LST adoption.
Retail vs. Concentration:
- 0.33% of wallets (30,220) control 54% of supply (includes exchanges/custodians).
- 97.4% of wallets hold <1,000 SOL, collectively owning 24.8% of supply.
Inflation: Solana’s uncapped supply has 4.395% annual inflation, decreasing by 15% yearly until stabilizing at 1.5%.

Note: Data on locked tokens and individual holders remains unclear; further verification is needed.

Author: Ignas

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

This is a simple question born out of curiosity. Last year, I wrote an article about “Where are the Ethereum tokens?” Later, @0xEekeyguy made a great public dashboard that can query the distribution of Ethereum tokens.

So, what about SOL?

Where are the SOLs hidden?

Disclaimer: This article is still a work in progress. I need your help to verify the data and provide new information about the current status of SOL and its ownership.

88% of the total SOL supply is in circulation.

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

Solana’s total supply is uncapped, and the current inflation rate is 4.395%, decreasing by 15% per year. The final inflation rate should stabilize at 1.5%.

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

Notably, 71% of SOL’s circulating supply is actively staked, compared to 30% for ETH.

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

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

 Source: https://solanacompass.com/tokenomics

However, I am having a hard time figuring out what these locked tokens are and who owns them.

According to Messari, 99.88% of SOL tokens have been unlocked. The only "locked" token is the 600,000 SOL held by FTX (which may have been sold through OTC transactions).

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

So what is the 11.2% of locked tokens reported by Solanacompass and CoinMarketCap? It is not clear.

Who holds SOL?

According to Arkham Intelligence, Coinbase holds $5 billion worth of SOL, or 4.7% of the total SOL supply.

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

Here are other major holders, ranked by percentage of circulating supply:

Binance — 3.97%
Jito – 1.61%
Upbit — 1.28%
OKx – 1.19%
Alameda — 0.92% (Possibly Messari-marked locked tokens?)
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%

In general, Arkham's statistics show that the top holders hold more than 20% of the circulating supply, which is a good number.

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

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

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

Galaxy also holds a considerable amount of SOL, reaching 8.8 million pieces. In addition, there are other institutions such as Ledger, Figment, Kiln1, and Everstake.

Many of the top wallets have not yet been marked as vested.

In order 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 circulating supply). Jito leads the way in this area.

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

Individual holders

Disclaimer: I attempted to count the number of individual holders using AI analysis and this data 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 a SOL wallet is: 16.8 SOL (the data is biased due to the influence of small holders).

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.