On-Chain Analysis: Whale Edition
🐟 Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day… Teach a man how to fish and he'll never be hungry 🎣
Who are whales?
They are crypto natives with a ton of money. They have so much money because
- They hit some home runs in the past (or better yet: swing consistent homeruns)
- They bought BTC/ETH early and know more about the space than you do
- They have better connections and insider information.
If only there would be a way to know what they’re doing everyday…
If only there was a public blockchain where every move is recorded and transparent for all to see…
So how do you track whales?
I’m pretty sure there is more resources, but I use excel spreadsheets and a combination of:
Etherscan.io
Zapper.fi
Debank.defi
Nansen.ai
I personally learned all this the old school way via etherscan alone, it was a mess and my life has been made so much easier with these better interfaces. But knowing how to use etherscan certainly comes in handy and is a must if you want to go down the road of on-chain analysis for your investments.
For etherscan: this thread along with some youtube tutorials go a long way:
Look for Confluence:
- Fundamentals are good
- Technicals look good.
- Whales are accumulating.
If it ticks all the boxes there’s a high likelihood that you’re looking at a gem.
It could be that the fundamentals & technicals are good but the risk reward is much greater if whales are accumulating than if a project is amazing on a fundamental level, but early whales are consistently selling. If you’re reading this and you’re a shrimp or small fish in an ocean of whales and sharks, you shouldn’t swim against the stream, rather make sure that you have the wind in your sails by following the flow of smart money.
Okay, today we start our detective work with Etherscan.io.
And fundamentally good project that we missed. Why?
What would you rather find:
- 🐳🐳🐳 who were early to meme coins that got rugged?
or
- 🐋🐋🐋 who invested early in the blue chips of today?
Exactly…
So let’s start with DOPEX ($DPX), a recent fundamentally good project I missed out on. So I want to know which whales did hear about it early in the pre-sale or seed round, so I can follow them to be early for future projects.
We find the contract address on coingecko of $DPX
2) put it in etherscan
3) click on DPX token tracker
Also, you can type in Dopex in etherscan search, but its good to get the hang of tracking contract addresses.
Because you can’t use search function for unknown, newly listed tokens.
Once you have done that there’s a couple options:
1) Find out who was early to that project
2) Find out who the largest (current) holders are
Today we’ll use the first method.
So with transfers we want to go back to the last page of transfers to find the earliest transactions in relation to $DPX.
This will give us all the transactions of people who were extremely early to this project.
Then amongst those who were early, we want to see who the heavy hitters were.
Basically you make a list of all the big transactions in the first week or so.
This is where it gets tricky. You will still end up with a sizable list of wallets. The following steps are pretty time consuming.
You would have to dig through the historic movements of every whale and then decide which ones are worth following.
Which ones were one hit wonders and got lucky?
Which ones are consistently early?
Which ones are the benevolent whales and invest for the long term and look for fundamentally good project?
Which ones are mercenary whales that wreck charts and dump on retail.
For the purpose of this article I’ll leave that for another future Whale Edition
Today I have done the hard work for you and found one particular whale of interest that bought over 10.000 $DPX in several buys (worth ~1million $ upon launch)
Clicking on transaction hash on the left, we can see the whales address since he’s using an ENS
Cool, we now have his wallet address. We then plug his wallet in etherscan, Nansen or DeBank.DeFi to learn more about this 🐋.
Well, we hit the jackpot.
This seems to be the nr. 1 whale by social rankings on Debank. No small feat.
I happen to know this whale. He goes by the name of Tetranode on twitter.
How do I know? When I first started tracking wallets over a year ago, I used logical deduction from his many different early projects and his tweets to come to the conclusion there could be only one benevolent whale of that size with those characteristics.
But Tetranode also is a LINK whale you might say, and I don’t see that listed on debunk.
Yes, true. But this is not his only wallet.
Tetranode’s other wallet is:
0xa22eb3338dfd69458513a1f6d4742ab29f7ef333
I’ll be giving out a bit of alfa here and there that you may not find in my twitter threads 👀
One important thing to note here is that there is plenty of people (14,000+) following him already, so you may be frontrun.
Also one of the things you notice on debunk or etherscan is that there seems to be a lot of activity in his wallet.
Every couple of minutes he seems to buy obscure coins.
Now before you hit that buy button for all these coins:
Be careful with etherscan and on-chain analysis.
Scammers know that people like you & me are watching whale wallets.
They will airdrop tokens (and make it look like they came from uniswap V2). If you buy them, your money will be lost, you can’t take it out.
How to tell the difference?
You can see if there was a contract interaction. By clicking on the transaction hash on the left, you can see it’s a one way street with these scam coins. Also there’s no ETH or USDC that leaves his wallet.
Another way to tell it’s a scam token is that there’s often a URL in the token name.
They try to get you to interact with your wallet on that website and hack/scam you that way.
The whole point for this thread, is that you learn how to fish 🎣
Not blindly ape.
Ok let’s continue on our search…
We’ll click on ERC20 tokens tab and view all transactions and try to find something of interest between the scam airdrops.
One transfer from 2 days ago catches my eye $FPIS (at the time of writing the original post).
When I click on it, it is one of the only ones that actually has a website, social profiles, and of course frax finance is a household name in DeFi.
Also there seems to be a lot of interest, only 2185 holders, which have been increasing rapidly.
Interesting…
You could do a quick search on the token address in token god mode in @nansen_ai (you can try it out for 9$ for 7 days and have access to all these features).
And then you see that this is not the only whale who has been accumulating $FPIS in the last 4–5days.
So again, don’t just blindly hit that buy button.
Follow the checklist:
- Where are we in the cycle, can BTC rug us all if it dips?
If so, how does that change your allocation?
- Do your due diligence (which means that unless you can answer the following questions, don’t invest).
What is the supply in circulation & max supply?
Marketcap and FDV?
Is there vesting/unlocks?
What keeps the whales from dumping on you?
Fundamentally strong project over longer time horizon (demand, use case etc.)
What are long term incentives?
In my case a due diligence always involves a twitter search and looking into discord and whitepapers.
And what do you know, one of the first things that comes up is this wonderful bullish thread from Kamikaz Eth:
Many people upon reading this instantly bought $FPIS. The price chart shows a big upward spike that coincides with timing of his thread.
On-chain analysis doesn’t lie however.
This same individual wrote a very bullish optimistic thread for his 20k+ followers and then proceeded to unload a big bag of $FPIS on those loyal followers.
I always say, be careful what your sources are, don’t be gullible
Thanks to the detective work of @sonicthehedgor on twitter, we now know that this is not the first time Kamikaz ETH pulled this stunt.
Let’s go over how Sonicthehedgor found out:
All the pump and dumps of Kamikaz Eth trace back to this wallet:
0xd63b0fcb6438b3be1035a1aec47b6459899356b3
To obfuscate the trail the original wallet funded 2 wallet:
(0x99a2a53d81526b9bda9953e004ce6fffc03174db
and
0xaa27aa2a34c9e314cf49cffe37daaeb85b724bcc)
You can see 800k DAI, a stable coin, coming into this wallet.
Another half a million here
These two wallets then bought and sent $FPIS to a third wallet: 0xf5445429a4e843b91c036ab4028cdb0f103a1017.
This wallet then dumped about 300k FPIS (over $2million) at ~ $12.90, after tweeting a $23 price target.
Then Kamikaz ETH plays victim on twitter and tweets that “insiders were selling”.
Again, the blockchain doesn’t lie.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Also the benevolent whale, Tetranode, took notice.
Full disclosure: I personally didn’t invest in $FPIS.
Why?
I see BTC and ETH’s weakness in the short term as a massive risk to any alt coin, so I have been on the sidelines mostly.
I am allocated to $FXS since the 4pool announcement. FXS should also benefit indirectly from inflows into $FPIS. Lastly I didn’t have time to research properly as I had some IRL commitments.
Let me tell you something about whales:
They’re people just like you and me. Sure, some have insider knowledge and connections.
But don’t put them on a pedestal and blindly follow, I’ve seen whales make mistakes all the time.
Some sell the bottom.
Some get rugged just like you and me.
Some are degenerate gamblers while other whales have a lower risk appetite.
Unless you’ve observed the historic movements of the whale in question’s, you don’t know which one is which;
A whale allocating 1million to some degen play, doesn’t mean you should go all-in.
You don’t know his total net worth (other wallets...) & how small of an allocation of his whole portfolio that is.
That’s why you should always take on-chain movements with a grain of salt and it’s not a substitute for doing your homework.
This turned out to be a great case study on how to find projects early, as well as how to identify big whale selling connected to a big twitter influencer.
At best on-chain analysis is a powerful tool in your toolkit that at times can give you a great edge.
The point of this thread is that I probably wouldn’t have found out about this project until later when it might have been too late.
Now we are in the driver’s seat and can choose to be relatively early if we like the fundamentals (and not too many mercenary whales).
Oh, and none of this is investment advice. I’m not a professional and mostly am stumbling my way through the world the same way I was at age 13. Just documenting and sharing some thoughts and none of it is a science. I, like everyone else, am simply an aged baby walking blindfolded into a forest, startled by my own humanity.