Bitcoin Forum

The first ICO was held by Mastercoin in 2013 with an idea to develop own protocol on top of Bitcoin blockchain. As a result, they managed to collect an equivalent of USD 500K. More than 500 people took part in the ICO. Going back to 2018, 3-5 ICOs are now held in average every week collecting not five hundred thousand but tens of millions of dollars.
More than a half of tokens of the overwhelming majority of ICOs  have goting into the hands of the ten largest investors. That said, if ICO initiators limit the number of tokens sold to one person, one investor (or a group of investors) can have several wallets, and no one will know about it because of anonymous character of blockchain. It follows that large players or whales using the blockchain slang play a significant role on the market. They invest several million dollars in a project at once leaving tiny bits to "ordinary people".
In order to be the first ones to get the best piece of ICO pie, whales use their deep pockets to buy the largest token blocks and pay in excess to be the first in the line. There is a well-known case when an investor paid USD 6K of commission to miners to process his transaction first. The whales on the cryptocurrency market are of various origin. Let's review several main types:
1. Groundbreakers
More than one cryptocurrency has shown more than a hundredfold growth within the last five years making its followers having believed in the coin at the very beginning and been able to survive the strongest market turbulence, extremely wealthy. These people have a very good feel of the market. For sure, most of them have kept investing in other cryptocurrencies wishing to repeat their success. Some of them have united to establish crypto funds, which will be covered later.
2. Miners
The process of cryptocurrency "production" at the account of computer capacity is called mining. Computers close a block of transactions and open a new one by solving complicated computational tasks using numerical method. That's how a chain of blocks is formed, hence the blockchain name (transaction blockchain). The system rewards the miner having found a correct answer by a fixed bonus in form of internal blockchain currency. Miners compete with one another for this prize. The more computational capacity a miner has, the higher is the chance to win.
3. Institutional investors and venture funds
It has been clear from the very beginning that uniting in pools is advantageous. According to Autonomous Next research there are more than ten groups with annual earnings exceeding USD 50M on the market. The players of older markets start reviewing the new market opportunities. Special funds emerge intending to invest only in cryptoeconomy. There are tens of examples of such companies: Polychain Capital, Digital Currency Group (dcg.co), Blockchain Capital (blockchain.capital) etc.

It should be noted that whales are dangerous not only for other investors but for the projects themselves. A situation when several persons hold a significant part of tokens has a negative impact on liquidity of this asset and bears a threat of market manipulation.