In short
- Concentration is measured after excluding burn, liquidity-pool and exchange addresses.
- A high top-holder share is exposure to one decision, whatever that holder intends.
- Wallet labels and clustering are heuristic and can be wrong.
What the number is
Holder concentration is the share of total supply held by the largest addresses, after removing addresses that are not really holders — burn addresses, the liquidity pool itself, and identifiable exchange wallets where the data supports identifying them.
Those exclusions matter more than they sound. A pool holding forty percent of supply is not a whale about to dump; it is the market. Counting it as a holder produces a frightening number that means nothing.
Why it matters
Concentration converts into risk you cannot diversify away. A wallet holding thirty percent of supply does not need to intend you harm — it needs to want out at the same time you do, and there will not be enough depth in the pool for both of you.
In tokens where holdings carry governance weight, concentration also decides who can change the rules. That is a second exposure on top of the price one, and it is easy to overlook when reading the figure purely as dump risk.
Clusters and their limits
Splitting one position across many wallets is cheap on every chain ScanZX covers, and it defeats a naive top-holder percentage. Where the data supports it, clustering is flagged — typically wallets funded from the same source within a short window, holding similar amounts.
This attribution is heuristic and is labelled as heuristic wherever it appears. Shared funding has ordinary explanations, and an operator willing to fund wallets independently over time will not produce the pattern at all. Treat a cluster flag as a reason to look, not a conclusion.
This guide is educational. Cryptoassets are high risk and you could lose all money used to buy them. ScanZX reports observed warning signs and data gaps at scan time — it never certifies that a token is safe. Nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell.