Guide to Tracking WHALE Wallets and Smart Money Wallets

By monitoring and observing the wallets of cryptocurrency whales, also known as smart money, it can help us react in time to market fluctuations and even find many potential investment opportunities. However, very few people share with you how to find these noteworthy wallets, or they may require you to pay for some features. Therefore, today we will guide you on how to track whale wallets, Smart Money wallets using some simple, free tools that you can easily look up yourself.

How to Track Whale Wallets, SmartMoney Wallets

What are Cryptocurrency Whales?

Cryptocurrency Whales, also known as “whales,” refer to individuals or groups, organizations that hold a large amount of money, owning a significant amount of cryptocurrency, and can influence the general market.

For example, in Bitcoin, a Whale is considered to be someone holding 1000 Bitcoin or more.

The above image is just an example for Bitcoin. However, whales usually own many different types of cryptocurrencies, not just BTC or ETH. For some smaller market cap coins, whales sometimes hold up to 5%, 10%… of the total tokens distributed. Overall, they are those who own a significant amount of various currencies, and this level of ownership is enough to significantly impact the market after each buy/sell transaction.

Although whales do not always intentionally manipulate market prices, the impact of their transactions is often felt by the cryptocurrency they hold. This has made them always “monitored,” and the community tends to exaggerate their actions. Typically, cryptocurrency whales can affect market prices in three ways:

• LARGE PURCHASES: When specific whale wallets start buying a particular cryptocurrency in large amounts, it causes the currency’s price to rise and encourages smaller investors to follow suit. This continues to push the cryptocurrency price up and will drop when there are fewer fomo investors. Then, whales begin to reduce their holdings. Meanwhile, smaller investors continue to invest unsuspectingly. Smarter investors monitor these whale movements to easily spot trends, withdraw before a sell-off starts, and re-enter the market after it has collapsed.
• LARGE SALES: The mass sell-off by cryptocurrency whales negatively impacts, regardless of the token’s market cap. Selling in large amounts causes smaller investors to panic, scrambling to keep up in hopes that the whale has insider information that others don’t. However, not all large transactions are whales dumping the price. Some are just wallet changes, as other wallets will also buy in large amounts. However, these movements affect the market.
• UNEXECUTED Buy/Sell Orders: Whales know they are being closely monitored, some issue buy or sell orders they know will not be executed. Naturally, these orders will show up in the order book and can move the market.

So, if we track whale wallets, what should we monitor? If we only rely on the BUY/SELL orders of whales, it may be quite late, and you are almost running behind. Tracking whale wallets requires you to grasp:

(1) – Transfers from wallet to exchange: When whales transfer cryptocurrency to an exchange wallet, they will (possibly) trade it. If it’s a regular token, then there’s a high risk of facing selling pressure. But when whales transfer a lot of stablecoins to the exchange, it could be a good sign as they are likely to buy.

(2) – Transfers from exchange to wallet: Transferring a certain amount of tokens out of the exchange reduces the circulating volume. Usually, scarcity drives up the price, but if this currency is one of the stablecoins, then it could be a bad sign.

(3) – Transfers between wallets: Monitoring transfers from one wallet to another reveals the moments when cryptocurrency whales move funds from one wallet to another. These transactions often have little or no impact on the currency’s price and may suggest a whale is conducting a private over-the-counter (OTC) trade.

What is Smart Money in Cryptocurrency?

Smart Money refers to the wallets of organizations and experienced investors in the market who have achieved many impressive investment accomplishments. They know how to follow trends, follow strong narratives, and know how to filter out potential projects to invest in from an early stage, before the project becomes popular. Overall, they are the winners in the market.

Smart Money could also be whales. They know how to grasp trends and the market and have strong financial resources.

Smart Money could also be the wallets of famous cryptocurrency VCs.

Smart Money could also be anonymous organizations or individuals, but somehow, they always find potential projects before everyone else, and are always early participants.

=> Importantly, we need to know how to filter/find Smart Money wallets, then track how they invest. It’s not simply about the buy/sell transactions of famous tokens in large amounts, or transactions from exchange ⇔ wallet. It requires us to delve deeper into their investment portfolios.

There are three main steps in tracking Smart Money cryptocurrency wallets:

• (1) Filter/search for wallets.
• (2) Gather in-depth data on on-chain transactions of the wallet.
• (3) Turn the collected data into useful information.

Through these, investors can learn about the actions of “smart” investors and can predict market developments by using signals from the actions of notable wallets.

What are other traders buying? How well do they understand the market? If they seem to have a better understanding of the market, what are they currently investing in, and what might they invest in next? Here are some things investors often look for when tracking their wallets:

• Investment History: When examining SmartMoney wallets, check their investment history to see what assets they have sold in the past and how they were managed. Look at when they bought and when they sold, and whether they made a profit or loss. This is a good way to assess whether a wallet is truly “smart money.” If the wallet has been making significant profits from most of its past transactions, then it might be worth noting.
• Tokens They Are Trading: What assets are your smart investors holding, buying, or selling? Look at this for additional data on how smart money investors feel about an asset. If they are popular assets, they may think that the asset will increase in value in the long or short term. If it’s a new token, is there possibly a new story about to unfold?
• Type of Transaction: Monitor whether the wallets you are tracking are buying, selling, receiving rewards, or getting offers from projects or other reputable organizations. Depending on your reason for tracking, this data could provide you with insights into their financial transactions, their participation in projects, etc. Individual wallets typically interact with a small number of exchanges and others. Group and project wallets are more likely to interact with more specialized protocols and conduct transactions like staking, mass distributions, and staking rewards.
• Direction of Transaction: If SmartMoney wallets are transferring assets to a centralized exchange, they might be about to take profits. If you’re tracking multiple “Smart Money” investors and they’re moving in the same direction (especially if the price of the asset has increased), then it’s likely time to take profits. Conversely, if SmartMoney wallets are actively buying into an asset, it might be worth further investigation.
• Transaction Amount: To assess an investor’s confidence in an asset or the impact of their transactions on the overall market, consider the asset’s ratio in the investor’s portfolio, the percentage of the total supply they hold, and allocation relative to the wallet size. In general, even for SmartMoney wallets, the larger the asset, the greater their influence on the market.
• Transaction Flow: Where is the money in the wallet coming from and going to? If a wallet is regularly receiving deposits of varying sizes from different wallets, it could be a trading wallet. Blockchain explorers try to label these transactions and wallets, but they can be missed in some cases. Institutional, individual investment wallets usually interact with fewer other wallets.
• Transaction Frequency: Pay attention to this criterion as well. Look at the frequency at which it repeats a cycle of transactions or specific trades. If it is continuously buying and selling an asset, it might just be trying to capitalize on short-term changes in the asset’s value for profit or simply trying to influence the market.

♦♦♦Beware of Scams♦♦♦: This refers to scam projects trying to attract the attention of some investors by transferring their tokens to some famous wallets, exploiting their reputation. This can lead people to think that the Smart Money wallet is interested in that project, and thus investors will fomo in. Therefore, filtering out scams is essential when tracking these smart money wallets. Blockchain explorers try to label these types of tokens to protect investors. If this information is not available, tracking transaction history is a great way to detect fraudulent coins in your wallet.

• Check how the Smart Money wallet received this token – Did they buy it on the exchange or receive it randomly from another wallet?
• Track the source wallet of the transaction and other transactions made by this source wallet, it might give you some insights.
• Check if the smart contract page provides additional information about the issuing project and if so, verify all the information related to the project etc…etc

Best “Alert” Tools for Whales, SmartMoney

Since blockchain transactions are generally transparent and irreversible, anyone can analyze them. The quickest and easiest method, especially for beginners, is to use “alert” tools for whale or SmartMoney activity. That is, there will be people who find and filter whale/smartmoney wallets for you, and post alerts about the activities of these wallets so that investors can catch up in time.

There are many tools to support this. But I will not list many, just recommend the most popular/must-use tools.

Whale Alert

Tracks large and unusual transactions to and from wallets and exchanges, while sharing updated information on Twitter and Telegram. Their 2 information channels you can follow:

• Telegram: https://t.me/s/whale_alert_io
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/whale_alert

Generally, any transaction moving from exchange to wallet, from wallet to exchange, from wallet to wallet… with a large amount of famous coins, will be alerted and marked according to importance. You just need to follow to update information quickly and fully, for free.

Sharkscan.io

SharkScan is currently tracking the portfolios of Shark wallets – addresses trading with assets over $50,000. You will know which coins they are holding, how much they have recently bought or sold. Based on this, you will have more data to make the right investment decisions.

Lookonchain

This is a Twitter account specializing in tracking buying and selling activities, investments of whale wallets, especially “smart money” wallets. If you want to track smart money flows, I recommend you follow them @lookonchain.

For example: Information about PEPE is constantly being posted, even people who are not very interested in memecoins like CZ have to pay attention to them. A clear opportunity from news and on-chain data for investors. Lookonchain even spent several days posting only about PEPE. At that time, just by investing in PEPE before Binance listed it, investors would certainly make a profit.

The SmartMoney is the luckiest guy I've seen recently.

He spent 0.125 $ETH ($251) to buy 5.9T $PEPE ($1.14M currently) 4 days ago.

If he sells at the current price of $0.0000001933, he will get a profit of ~$1.14M, more than 4,500x.https://t.co/cUqMO6zIVO pic.twitter.com/Ex5voyRvsa

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) April 19, 2023

And not just tracking what Smart Money and whale wallets are doing, you can use the information provided by lookonchain, save their wallet addresses, and then learn more about them (details will be in the section below).

How to Find and Track Whale Wallets, Smart Money Wallets on Your Own

The most interesting thing about cryptocurrency is the transparency of the blockchain. Thanks to the decentralized nature of blockchain, you can follow the activities of cryptocurrency whales and monitor their wallets and transactions. The 3 tools I introduced above will help you find some wallets and alert you to some transactions.

But – they also have disadvantages, the information is too visible, many people know, and by the time the information reaches you, you are “following” quite late. Smarter investors train themselves to filter/search on their own. Below are some BASIC steps. (Learn from the BASICS, once proficient, you may be able to access and learn about more advanced tools).

Blockchain Explorer

First, use a tool called blockchain explorer, as it will help you explore the blockchain. Millions of cryptocurrency transactions are recorded on the blockchain. Small transactions are not a problem. However, when you notice transactions worth millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, you will know that a significant change in value is about to occur.

• Filter and find wallet addresses holding large amounts of cryptocurrency tokens.
• Track their activity to see what they are doing with that amount of tokens.

Open Etherscan, and you will see all ERC tokens there. If you want to look up tokens from other blockchains, use their respective blockchain explorer (Blockchain Explorer). For example:

• Ethereum: Etherscan
• BNB Chain: BscScan
• Solana: Solana Explorer (Beta) or SolanaFM
• Avalanche: Avalanche Explorer
• TRON: TRONScan
• Polygon: Polygonscan

I will use Etherscan as an example. Enter the name of the token (or the contract of the token) you want to look up in the Etherscan search box, and it will display a lot of important information for you. But switch to the Holders (Holders) section.

• If all tokens are concentrated in just a few accounts, this could be a bad sign, as there will be a significant price drop if they are sold.
• If a large amount of tokens is deposited on an exchange, it could mean that the holders are only looking for short-term profits.

If your goal is to find wallets that have bought in large quantities, or bought early, you can filter based on the size of holdings:

You can also do this by viewing the transaction history.

You can do this for any token you want to look up. The goal is to find wallets that bought large + bought early.

ArkhamIntel

ArkhamIntel has become one of the best on-chain tools today, tracking seven different chains with many relatively powerful functions. And, their beta version is also free now.

By searching for the name of a token, you can know more detailed on-chain data. As shown below, this is the interface displayed after I search for ARB token.

From this page, you can track recent inflow/outflow of ARB, see ARB holders, and filter specific transactions (such as from a specific wallet, custom value, or date).

So, how do I usually use Arkham to filter specific wallets? Let me show you an example.

First, start by searching for coins that have significantly increased in price recently. For example, from the end of 2022 to the beginning of January 2023, LDO increased sharply continuously. In fact, using Arkham, we can see that whales bought and accumulated LDO in large quantities before the token took off.

– Step 2: Open the homepage of the Arkham platform, and on the right side of the page, you will see a list of wallets and their transactions, click on the three lines to the left of “TOKEN” as in the picture below:

– Step 3: Then, search for the token you are interested in (we continue using LDO as an example). Then select the time period before this token was pumped strongly (for example in the picture, LDO surged from 1/1).

– Step 4: Click on “Value” to sort transactions by price. Now, you can see a list of whales that bought LDO before it started to rise.

After completing the above steps, you can find wallets that are not named. For example: After filtering the transaction list, this wallet caught my attention:

If you click further on the wallet address, Arkham will display for you the latest activities of the wallet and its assets held on the blockchain.

Additionally, if we sort transactions by the LDO token, you can also see that the whales sold their LDO at the end of January after it doubled in price, as shown in the picture below:

=> In summary, what did you learn? You can do the same with other tokens, and the method is similar to what I did with LDO. Then, you can continue to track the past trading activities of this whale to see if this whale/smartmoney makes similar trades. Just imagine, if we can track such a wallet for activity, wouldn’t the potential benefits be greater? If you agree with this wallet’s activities, you can directly add it to your watchlist. If you also want to be notified when the whale buys or sells the next token, you can access “Alert” and create alert notifications to track whale activities in real-time.

Debank

When you find a specific wallet that may belong to a known entity through tools like ArkhamIntel, Blockchain Explorer, or from whale, smart money alert channels as mentioned in section 3 above. To see what these “whale” and “smart money” wallets are buying, you can track them on DeBank. This tool allows you to view the transactions and investments of certain wallets, see what they are buying/selling, holding in projects…

• Access: https://debank.com/
• Paste the wallet address into the search box. Then, you will see a summary of assets this wallet is holding, along with their transactions.

Through Debank, you can learn a lot of detailed information about a wallet, such as: details of its assets on all chains, its data sent to DeFi protocols, and all its historical transaction records (and you can also filter and view by specific assets).

Additionally, if you pay more attention to the transactions of whales, you can find them directly through Debank Whales, this page has filtered a range of whale addresses for you and can help you track all major events on the chain in real-time.

Besides the 3 typical tools I just introduced above, there are many other websites/tools to help you look up this data, such as Nansen, DEXTools, DEXscreener… The method of filtering/finding is quite similar at the core, just differing a bit in the interface.

Note, only use buy transactions as a basis for further research, do not blindly follow – as there is no guarantee that the investment will increase in price or ensure a profit. It’s necessary to combine with many factors, consider trends, capital flows, valuation, community… of the new project, to see if it’s a good investment or not.

Tips – use BOTs to track Whale, SmartMoney wallets

There’s a trick to use BOTs for convenient tracking of wallets that you have filtered/found, instead of having to search for them manually.

After you have found a whale or Smart Money wallet that meets your criteria. Open Telegram, find the bot with username @EtherDROPS6_bot or access the link https://t.me/EtherDrops6_bot. Press Start and then proceed as the steps below.

Choose Add Wallet => Choose the blockchain of that project => Done and enter the Whale wallet address + Name the wallet as you want.

Then, select Transaction Volume to set alerts for the bot – Here I also choose an example over $100,000, but you can set any amount $10K, $20K, etc.

Now, you can automatically monitor the behavior of this Whale/Smart Money wallet whenever a large transaction is made. One fine day, when you receive a notification that this wallet has bought $200K, $300K of a certain token, you can also take a look and decide whether to follow or not.

That’s it. From now on, whenever this wallet buys something, you will be among the first to catch the signal.

In addition, don’t miss the following articles:

• How to track top cryptocurrency VCs to find attractive “hidden gems”
• GUIDE to finding potential meme coins EARLIEST, minimizing risk

Above are the guidelines on how to track whale wallets, smart money wallets of cryptocurrency. Although there are dozens, hundreds of different tools supporting this, this article selects popular/free tools so that any new investor can easily access and look up. If you have any questions, just leave a comment below this article for me to answer. Thank you for reading the article and wish you find many potential investment opportunities.