One entity holds 47% of HEV

HEV's list of holders looks spread out: no wallet holds more than 1.6% of the supply. But 80 of those wallets share a history that ordinary holders don't, and between them they hold nearly half the coin.

Each square below is one percent of HEV's billion tokens, as they were held on 17 September. The gold squares are the 80 wallets. Between them they held more than every other wallet combined.

All 80 wallets were created within 15 days of each other, about two months before HEV existed. Then they were barely used. Of the 80, 39 made exactly one transaction before HEV launched, and the other 41 made exactly ten.

That is unusual. Of HEV's 107 other holders of 0.1% or more, only two made exactly one or exactly ten transactions before launch, and neither was created in those two weeks of July.

HEV opened for trading at 19:12 UTC. Six seconds later, 80 wallets bought it, all in the same second. This report calls them the snipers: wallets that buy in the first moments of a launch.

Over the next half hour, each sniper sold all of its HEV in a single sale and sent almost all of the money to one of the July wallets, which spent it on HEV in the same instant. By minute 31 all 80 had done it, each paying a different July wallet.

So the two groups end up as opposites. The snipers hold no HEV at all today: every one of them sold its whole position. The July wallets they paid still hold everything they bought, less what five of them have since sent on.

The simple way to move tokens from one wallet to another is to send them, and the transfer shows up in the token's public history for anyone to see. None of these 80 handovers did that. The HEV went through HEV's trading pool instead: the sniper sold it to the pool, and the July wallet bought it from the pool.

HEV trades against a token called LIT, so selling HEV earns LIT and buying HEV costs LIT. The link between the two wallets is the LIT. Here is one of the 80 handovers, 15 minutes after launch.

Solana records transactions in blocks, a new one roughly every 0.4 seconds. The sale and the buy landed in the same block, and the buy was the very next transaction after the sale. The July wallet ends up with slightly less HEV than the sniper sold, because HEV charges a 3% fee on every transfer, the pool charges a fee on every trade, and the sniper kept 0.9% of the money.

Read HEV's own history and this looks like one wallet selling and an unrelated one buying. What connects them is the LIT: the seller passed almost all of what it was paid straight to the buyer, and the buyer spent exactly that amount on HEV, in the same block.

The 80 wallets still hold their HEV. On 19 September they held 47.1% of the supply, about $1.8 million at that day's price, and not one of them has sold a single token. 75 of the 80 have not made a transaction of any kind since they bought. In the week after launch HEV's price rallied five times, by between 25% and 68%, and none of the 80 sold into any of those rallies.

The only movement has been nine transfers. Five of the wallets have sent some HEV straight to other wallets rather than selling it, 4.6% of HEV in all. Six of the transfers went out within two minutes of each other, less than two hours after launch; the other three came two, six and seven days later. The six that went out together came from the three July wallets that had bought the most, about 2.3% of HEV each, two from each; with one later transfer they left all three holding between 1.1% and 1.3%.

Most of what was sent on has not stayed put. The nine receiving wallets, which are not part of the 80, got 4.4% of HEV between them after HEV's transfer fee, and on 19 September they held 1.4%. Five hold none or almost none of what they were sent, two hold part of it and two hold all of it. Where the rest went is beyond this report.

On a list of holders, these 80 wallets look like 80 unrelated people, each holding between 0.14% and 1.6% of HEV. Nothing about that looks unusual. Only their history shows otherwise.

The blockchain records wallets, not people, so this report can't say who that entity is. What it can show is that 80 wallets created in the same fortnight, left alone for the same two months, filled the same way by 80 snipers in the same half hour, and holding in step through every rally since are not 80 strangers. They are one holder: one that had its wallets ready long before HEV existed, and a plan for launch day.

For HEV as it stands, that means nearly half of the supply, about $1.8 million at 19 September's price, sits in wallets that have so far acted as one, in a coin worth about $3.7 million in total. While they hold, the holder list makes HEV look more widely held than it is. If they sell, they can do it through 80 wallets that each look small, and no single large seller would ever show on that list. No rally has yet drawn a sale from any of them, which fits a position that is being kept rather than traded. What they do next is not something the blockchain can say in advance.

Two things would change this reading: one of the 80 selling on its own, out of step with the rest, or their funding traced to separate, unconnected sources. Neither has happened so far.

We listed every holder of HEV on 17 September and read the token's first trades. Every wallet holding 0.1% or more (187 wallets, with 80.6% of the supply between them) was then traced one by one: when it was created, how many transactions it made before and after launch, where its HEV came from, and what it has done since. On 19 September we read all 80 handovers in full, and read again the balances of the 80 wallets, their snipers and the wallets they sent HEV to. HEV's price and trading volume are as shown by DexScreener on 19 September. Every wallet and transaction below opens on Solscan, a public blockchain explorer.

Slawth Glass is a tool that reads the holder lists of StonkFun tokens. This report was made with it.