Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have solidified their positions as robust, decentralized networks with potential for growth and adoption across web3 and DeFi.
Recent milestones—Ethereum’s evolving ownership landscape and Bitcoin’s record-breaking hashrate (basically the amount of computing power securing the BTC network)—underscore their resilience and adaptability.
Drawing from on-chain data by Nansen and other industry insights, it is now clear that these developments reflect the networks’ maturity and potentially foreshadow their future trajectories.
Despite major challenges and competition from Solana (SOL), Ethereum remains the leading smart contract platforms focused on decentralized applications, and tokenized assets, with its ecosystem maturing into a complex web of stakeholders.
According to Nansen’s 2025 analysis, the largest Ethereum holders include staking contracts, centralized exchanges, and institutional players like ETFs and custodians.
The Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Deposit Contract dominates, holding 59.75 million ETH—nearly 50% of the total supply—reflecting the network’s successful shift to proof-of-stake.
Other top holders include Coinbase (4.93 million ETH), Binance (4.23 million ETH), and Bitfinex (3.28 million ETH), alongside institutional entities like Grayscale (1.20 million ETH) and smart contracts like Wrapped Ether (2.80 million ETH).
This distribution highlights distinct categories shaping Ethereum’s economy.
The Beacon Contract underscores staking’s centrality to network security, while exchanges and custodians like Coinbase and Robinhood (1.66 million ETH) aggregate retail and institutional assets.
Smart contracts and Layer-2 bridges, such as Base (1.71 million ETH), lock ETH for DeFi utility and interoperability, driving capital efficiency.
This concentration among staking infrastructure, exchanges, and institutions signals both liquidity consolidation and growing institutional trust—key indicators of Ethereum’s market maturity.
Nansen’s tools, like Token God Mode and the Entities tab, empower users to dissect this ownership further.
The Wallet Profiler reveals individual wallet activity, while Token God Mode filters balances and labels wallets as exchanges, contracts, or individuals.
The Smart Money Dashboard tracks high-performing wallets, and the Entity view consolidates holdings by organizations, offering a view of ETH flows.
Such transparency is vital for understanding liquidity risks, market trends, and institutional involvement as Ethereum scales.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin achieved a historic feat on April 4, 2025, when its hashrate surpassed 1 zettahash (1 ZH/s), per Glassnode data.
This milestone—1,000 times the 1 exahash per second (EH/s) reached in 2016—demonstrates the network’s steady growth in computational power.
The previous record, set January 31, 2025, at 975 EH/s, was eclipsed amid a 7% difficulty adjustment on April 6, pushing the metric to an all-time high of 121.5 trillion.
This adjustment, the largest since July 2024, reflects Bitcoin’s self-regulating mechanism, ensuring blocks are mined every 10 minutes despite surging hashrate.
However, miner revenue per exahash, or hashprice, plummeted to a record low of $42.40, driven by low transaction fees, escalating difficulty, and a bitcoin price hovering around $77,000—down 10% since early April, partly due to U.S. tariff policies under President Trump.
While the 1 ZH/s peak is historic, short-term variability skews daily figures; the 7-day average of 879 EH/s offers a steadier gauge.
Still, this hashrate surge bolsters Bitcoin’s (BTC) overall security, making it nearly impregnable to attacks, a cornerstone of its value proposition.
And for Ethereum, the Pectra upgrade, slated for May 7, 2025, promises to enhance staking efficiency (EIP-7251), reduce L2 costs (EIP-7691), and improve wallet usability (EIP-7702), potentially spurring adoption and tightening ETH supply as institutional staking grows.
Bitcoin’s hashrate milestone, despite miner revenue decline, signals a network poised for longevity, with miners likely adapting through efficiency gains or consolidation.