Ethplorer’s Aleksandr Vat Says Ethereum’s Altseason Already Happened

What Happened

At Paris Blockchain Week, BeInCrypto sat down for an exclusive interview with Aleksandr Vat, Head of Business Development at Ethplorer.io, to discuss the company’s new Aggregated Ethereum Rich List.

Ethplorer argues that traditional Ethereum rich lists have become increasingly misleading because they rank wallets by ETH holdings alone. Its new ranking looks at the total USD value held by each address, including ETH, ERC-20 tokens, and stablecoins.

Photo provided by Aleksandr Vat

Market Context

According to Vat, this changes the picture of Ethereum wealth, liquidity, and risk. It also leads to one of Ethplorer’s more provocative conclusions: altseason may have already happened, but in balance sheets rather than price charts.

Aleksandr Vat: ETH-only rankings ignore most of the capital. Today, around 66% of value sits outside ETH, mostly in tokens and stablecoins. That means ETH-based lists give a distorted view of who controls liquidity and risk.

Aleksandr Vat: The biggest change was that the entire hierarchy changed. The same top 10,000 addresses hold almost three times more capital when tokens are included. Many players that were previously almost invisible suddenly become dominant.

Aleksandr Vat: Increasingly, it is systems rather than individuals. Smart contracts, exchanges, and liquidity hubs now control a large share of capital. Ethereum has become less whale-centric and more entity-centric.

What is important is that we can now measure it. In ETH-based rankings, this change was almost invisible. Once we look at aggregated balances, it becomes clear that a large share of capital is already controlled by smart contracts, DeFi protocols, bridges, and liquidity pools. Roughly 28% of total capital is now controlled by these systems.

Aleksandr Vat: Altseason did not disappear. It moved from price charts to balance sheets.

BeInCrypto: Why did the market miss this?

Why It Matters

Ethereum’s Rich List Has Changed

BeInCrypto: At the conference, you discussed the new Ethereum ranking with the community. What is the Aggregated Ethereum Rich List, and why did Ethplorer build it?

Details

Aleksandr Vat: Ethplorer rebuilt the Ethereum rich list by ranking addresses not only by ETH, but by total USD value. That includes ETH, ERC-20 tokens, and stablecoins.

The Aggregated Ranking of Ethereum addresses is based on totalBalanceUsd, unlike traditional rankings, which are sorted by ethBalanceUsd. The goal was simple. ETH-only rankings no longer show real economic power on Ethereum.

BeInCrypto: What was fundamentally wrong with traditional ETH-based rankings?

BeInCrypto: What was the biggest insight when you first rebuilt the ranking?

Ethereum Is Becoming Entity-Centric

BeInCrypto: Vitalik Buterin envisioned Ethereum as a platform where code manages value. Has that vision been realized?

So this is no longer only a vision. It is an observable structural reality.

“Altseason Already Happened”

BeInCrypto: You say that “altseason already happened.” What do you mean by that?

Through most of 2017–2021, ETH represented the majority of Ethereum’s economic value, while tokens and stablecoins played secondary roles.

That structure has since changed. By 2022–2023, token-denominated balances had matched ETH in economic weight.

In Ethereum’s Aggregated Rating 2026, ETH no longer dominates portfolios. The top 10,000 addresses held about $342 billion in total value at the end of March 2026. Of this amount, $116.5 billion was held in ETH, equal to roughly 34%, while the remaining 66% was denominated in tokens.