Open source blockchain analytics firm Moonstream published a written report, which found that around 17% of addresses control more than fourscore% of all nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on Ethereum.

The written report was published on Oct. 21 and the analysis was conducted on more than seven million NFT transactions on the Ethereum blockchain between April i and Sept. 25, 2022.

The report found that whales, NFT platforms and exchanges, which comprise the acme 16.71% of all addresses, own eighty.98% of NFTs on Ethereum.

The remaining 83.29% of NFT owners were merely able to snap upwards "a handful of tokens'' during that time frame.

"This latter statistic does crave a little more nuance in its interpretation, however, as many of those owners are marketplaces and clearinghouses like OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, and other platforms of the aforementioned ilk," Moonstream said.

The figures seem to closely replicate the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, which is a mutual factor across different markets and sectors. The principle is based on the idea that around 80% of consequences come from twenty% of the causes.

"Fascinating to run into the Pareto principle more or less hold in a market as advanced and traditionally 'irrational'," said Reddit user "xddemonesque" in response to the report.

Moonstream's information set focuses on ERC 721 tokens and does not include any data from layer two networks such as Polygon, nor does it source data from centralized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

"Our scan of these one,145,767 blocks yielded transfer activity for 7,020,950 tokens from 9,292 NFT contracts across 727,102 addresses. These mints and transfers course the cadre of the dataset," the report reads.

Related: NFTs permit people to 'interact with crypto in a hands-on way' — Shaq

While Moonstream highlighted the "great inequality" of NFT ownership on Ethereum, the business firm as well argued that the NFT market is still open up enough for small-scale investors to participate, and pointed to the majority of NFT holders being small-time traders who were able to purchase their assets with relative ease:

"What this information shows us is that the Ethereum NFT market place is open in the sense the vast bulk of its participants are small-time purchasers who probable make their purchases manually. There are few barriers to entry for those who wish to participate in this market."