How to do Whale watching like a Pro
Observing the splashes of the big mythical Mobi Dick used to be a fun and privileged position in the earlier days of crypto. Eventually, more folks caught up to the secrets, which means they’re no longer secrets. In addition, the rise of Over-the-counter brokers who now handle a substantial volume of digital asset trade has made whale watching harder than before.
What are crypto whales?
Whales are entities that hold enough cryptocurrency that they have the potential to manipulate their respective price movements.
What constitutes a whale movement?
It largely depends on your choice of whale tracking tool. Whale Alerts for example alerts on every transaction on thirteen blockchains that exceed $1M. this sometimes can be misleading as we will see in the paragraphs below
Here are a few tips for observing whale market movements that still haven’t gotten old.
Observe movements in and out of exchanges
Whales are less likely to sell if they’ve just moved their holdings off an exchange. Enough whale movements off exchanges and into wallets for a specific cryptocurrency can cause a sudden reduction in market-ready supply. When you see that cryptocurrency is being sent from a regular wallet to an exchange wallet, it usually means that someone is about to sell. When a reverse transaction happens it means the wallet is not looking to sell anytime soon. It is a bad sign is when a large percentage of tokens are sitting in exchanges. It probably means a lot of top holders are getting ready to sell.
Observe the token’s market depth
By definition, a market depth is an amount needed to move a token’s price up or down by 2%. The larger the amount needed to move a token’s price, the larger the market depth, which is a good signal. Observe an individual token’s market depth, not every whale transaction is capable of triggering a significant price movement. For example, If you see $10 million worth of ETH being transferred from a wallet to an exchange with a market depth of $20 or $30 million dollars to the downside, then the effect on price could be minimal.
Monitor order books
This approach is more suitable for advanced-level traders. To monitor order books, you will have to go on major exchanges to look at the trade feed of recent large trades. Any orders that are excessively large may tell you information about how the market is moving. It’s a very tedious and difficult process to be constantly checking and refreshing the pages, so you might want to disconnect your computer from the Internet while doing so. You can go to CoinLobster to see live trade feeds (and liquidations) across all the major spot and futures exchanges and filter by trade size – for example only showing trades greater than $1million USD – so you can always be aware when a whale buys or sell.
Tools for finding great whale wallet addresses to track
Etherscan.io
A great strategy to find good wallets to track is to look at wallets that got in big positions early. They might be good at identifying tokens before the rest of the market does. To do this, head to etherscan.io, locate the appropriate token then look through the transfer history and sort by Last. Look for wallets that bough a lot early. View the address in the block explorer. Look through their ERC-20 transaction history and see if they’ve had success in the past. If so, they’re likely worth following. Look at a whale’s top holdings, and see what they’ve dumped and picked up recently. You should have a list of at least a few wallets.
Whale Alert
@Whale_alert is one of those handy little Twitter bots which notifies in real-time on significant movements between large wallets and exchanges.
LunarCrush
LunarCrush allows you to look at social metrics and sentiment analysis for various cryptocurrencies. Gauging the strength and the sentiment behind a cryptocurrency project can help you out in identifying an undervalued gem
Nansen
Nansen belongs to my list of preferred crypto whale watching tools as it is one of the best on-chain analysis tools. There are a lot of useful features, like their token god mode. Their hot wallet feature suggests a predefined list of wallet addresses you can expand further on your own.
Closing thoughts
The list of whale-watching tools is exhaustive and it has less to do with the choice of tool and more with your approach and seriousness. A dedicated crypto whale watcher would find that Etherscan is more than enough. By approach, I mean being realistic around your own circumstances. The amount you spend whale watching is futile for smaller trades and it soon becomes a sort of addiction.
Whales are also adept at recognizing the psychology of the whale watching masses and oftentimes the moves they make are to confuse and delude them. Keep your emotions at bay, mind cold, and have a clear matrix for entering and exiting trades and profit-taking.
Mario Nawfal: Author’s Biography
Mario Nawfal is the Founder of the Athena Group of Companies, a business conglomerate of 15+ companies that operates in more than 40 countries.
A seasoned entrepreneur outside of crypto with business in over 30 countries, Mario’s influence in crypto spans hundreds of investments as an angel investor and the founder of IBC Group. Mario’s company IBC Group has been a top tier incubator since 2017 having invested in and/or marketed some of the industry’s largest projects. Most recent examples include Sidus Heroes, MetaMall, Genopets and DeFi Yield. Mario is also partner at International Blockchain Legal and a world renowned public speaker in both crypto and entrepreneurship.
Mario’s most notable achievement is his position as a Co-Founder and the CEO of NFT Technologies, a portfolio company expected to list soon on a stock market in Canada under the ticker “NFT”. Backed by notable investors and crypto thought leaders, NFT Tech will play a major role in growing the NFT and Metaverse space.
