‘Whale watching’ is a popular pastime for crypto analysts and investors. Because blockchain data is publicly available, we can monitor the addresses of large crypto HODLers and these sentiment checks on whales offer several advantages to traders:
- Due to the ability of whales to influence price movements (especially in the short-term), you can use on-chain data to tag along with the trades they execute. By watching their activity on the blockchain, you might discover tokens or contracts worth paying attention to as ‘smart money’ flows in.
- Whale watching may help with timing an entry or exit into a token. When a whale enters a position, it may be a good time to get some exposure, especially if the whale has a successful track record of getting in early. Similarly, when a whale sells a token, that could be your cue to exit, as it may lead to more selling by other participants or the whale may be privy to information that others aren’t aware of.
- Monitoring what whales do is a low-effort activity, but comes with a potentially high payoff. All you have to do is track addresses and use certain tools, so traders do not need to analyze charts, spend a lot of time doing fundamental analysis, and so on.
While there are some advantages of whale watching, it’s important to be aware of the limitations:
- No one, including whales, can predict what's going to happen in the markets with 100% certainty. While they may throw lots of money into a contract, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will turn out to be a good investment. Given whales have much more capital at their disposal, they may often take risks that may not be suitable for other traders with less capital.
- All the blockchain data and free tools for tracking wallets with large holdings can be accessed by anyone, so this information should be incorporated into the markets pretty quickly. The edge you have when tracking whales comes from how fast you act upon it and how fast others are to react to these events.
- Whales are not the sole factor determining market movements. A token might see a lot of buying or selling pressure from whales, but that may only impact the market over the short-term, while fundamental factors may outweigh their sentiment over longer timeframes.
So how can you track whales and put this into practice? Read on to find out more!
How to Track Cryptocurrency Whales
To swim with the whales, here are 9 tools you can use to get started!
1. Block Explorers
Any avid whale watcher can start with a block explorer like Etherscan. Once you’re familiar with using block explorers to search addresses and understand transactions, you can move on to more advanced techniques.
Create an account with Etherscan and you can receive alerts via email for any addresses on your watchlist. You can then navigate to the top addresses and find some whales (note that many of the top addresses are associated with centralized exchanges, so you’ll have to do some digging).
The following tools in this list will help you identify whales and start adding addresses to your watchlist.
2. Dune Analytics
Several Dune Analytics dashboards allow you to track whales:
- The ETH Whales Tracking dashboard, made by @springzhang, tracks the top 1000 ETH holders and their most recent transactions.
- The Whales Transaction Tracker dashboard, created by @gcrypt20, allows you to select the top N whales and track their transactions. For example, if you only want to track the top 50 whales, you can specify N = 50 and see their on-chain activities.
You can find other dashboards by searching ‘whale’ and then rank by favorites, trending or new. If you’re familiar with SQL, you can even write your own queries to find whale transactions by project.
3. DeBank
DeBank has a cool feature called Web3 Social Ranking, which ranks wallets based on their on-chain activity and influence in Web3.
To make tracking whales a lot more convenient, you can follow any of these accounts and their transactions will appear in your feed in real-time.
4. Nansen
Nansen labels addresses with the highest realized profit across DEXes, NFTs and liquidity providers as ‘smart money’. The data is updated in real-time and these flows may precede large price movements.
Anyone can sign up for a free account on Nansen, which will allow you to see the smart money flows into DeFi contracts, NFTs and ERC-20 tokens. More features and deeper insights are unlocked with the paid subscription.
5. Twitter
There are several Twitter accounts that track whales in real time and you can enable notifications to get updated in real time.
Some worthy follows:
Many of these accounts have accompanying websites where you can analyze the top wallets and what exactly they are doing on-chain.
- You can monitor large trades in real-time on CoinLobster’s website, allowing you to choose a cryptocurrency pair and a filter for the trade size
- WhaleAlert’s website tracks large transactions in real time.
- Whalestats analyzes the top 100 ETH wallets.
6. UniWhales
UniWhales is a tracker for DEX swaps, liquidity, bridging and much more across 12 blockchains, which offers a Telegram channel that posts trades in real time. The Etherscan links are also included, so you can do some more investigation of these addresses.
There’s also a paid version for more detailed insights, where you can get access by purchasing some UWL tokens.
7. TradingLite
Order flow on the popular centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase can also uncover the intentions of whales. Using the TradingLite charting platform, you can identify large buys, sells and limit orders across different cryptocurrency exchanges.
First off, areas of demand and supply can be highlighted by the heatmap feature, which shows the areas with large limit orders resting in the book, which are likely to be zones of support and resistance.
The brighter yellow areas show where there are large orders and might point out price areas where there’s strong support or resistance due to whales buying or selling. You can use these levels to set up limit orders on Perp v2 so that you can follow their trades. When hovering over the heatmap, you can see the quantity of orders at each price point.
There’s also a trades sidebar that can be customized to filter out trade sizes below a certain level. In the screenshot below, only executed trades of 10 ETH or more will be shown, and flurry of large buys can indicate that whales are buying and may precede a significant price movement to the upside. Similarly, a string of large sells may indicate that the price will continue to drop.
However, it’s important to note that just because a price zone has a large quantity of limit orders ready to buy or sell does not guarantee that these levels will hold, but just increases the probability that a major reversal may occur around these areas.
‘Spoofing’ is a form of market manipulation where large buy or sell walls are used to influence other participants, so it’s important to keep this in mind when looking at order flow data. For example, a whale might post a sell wall to dampen bullish sentiment and encourage others to sell, only then to remove it as the price falls and then buy in at a lower price.
8. Aggr.trade
Aggr.trade aggregates large trades ($100,000 or more) and liquidations of $50,000 or more in real time from different centralized exchanges to show whale activity.
Similar to the trades tab in TradingLite, we’d want to monitor the feed to see how frequent large trades are made over time. When there are a lot of large buys, then it could signal that prices will rise further. On the other hand, a feed that’s full of sells could point to further weakness.
9. WhaleMap
WhaleMap currently only supports Bitcoin, but metrics for Ethereum, Solana and DeFi markets are under development!
What this tool does is provide a nice visualization of the levels where whales are active in the markets, highlighting important zones of demand and supply. There are many different charts on WhaleMap, which you can learn more about here.
One useful indicator on WhaleMap is the large wallet inflows, which shows the price at which BTC is bought by wallet size (by day or hour).
If lots of large holders are accumulating bitcoin at a certain price (such as around $18,000 on the chart above), then it likely indicates that strong support is found at this level and suggests these whales are bullish.
Summary
By following entities with large holdings or those perceived as ‘smart money’, you can enter positions and make investment decisions with relatively little effort just by using the 9 tools listed above.
Although it is worth mentioning that you should always do your due diligence and have your own rules for shadowing whales, as it’s not a surefire way to be profitable. Nevertheless, it is one important technique that you can add to your toolkit when investing or trading cryptocurrencies.