What is Crypto whale? The influence of whales in crypto

Crypto whale is a term that refers to individuals/organizations holding a large amount of certain tokens, with trading sizes that can reach millions/billions of USD. For example, Bitcoin whales refer to entities that own over 1,000 BTC with trading capacity large enough to fluctuate the price of Bitcoin.

Due to their great influence on the crypto market, most whales restrict normal transactions on exchanges. Instead, whales trade assets through OTC, to limit the risk of market fluctuations when they buy and sell crypto.

However, there are still some whales who intend to manipulate the market with their trading volume, with the aim of profiting for themselves.

Why does the community call them crypto whales?

Many people think that the crypto market is similar to the ocean with many different types of fish, in which whales are entities of huge size and relatively few in number. Therefore, in the crypto market, "class" is also divided from small fish such as "shrimp", "fish", "crab"... with the number of asset holdings accounting for about 20-30% of the total supply.

Whales are entities with much smaller numbers than shrimp, fish, crabs... but the amount of assets held by crypto whales can be more than 30% of the total supply.

In addition to the "fish" components mentioned above, the crypto market also has an unlisted component, the centralized exchange CEX. Normally, the CEX exchange is not counted as a whale because the above assets are essentially whales. belongs to many people and not to one individual/organization.

For example, in the case of Bitcoin, users can see that the number of retail investors holding Bitcoin is relatively large at more than 99%, but the total supply they hold is only approximately 20%, a relatively low number compared to quantity.

In the opposite direction, whales (whale and humpback) have a number of about 0.005% but the total supply is 28%, much larger than juveniles. From here, users can see that the influence of whales on Bitcoin value is much greater than that of small fish combined.

The influence of crypto whale on market psychology
The weight of crypto whale transactions is relatively large, from supporting the coin's value to increase to being able to cause a coin to decrease by 20-30% within 1 transaction. This leads to many retail investors wanting to grasp the purpose of whales, to make profits for themselves.

But with the transparent nature of blockchain and the above mentality, many people believe that whales are the ones who truly understand market psychology. Specifically, crypto whales can create a large buy order to make the price of a coin increase, then retail investors start to have FOMO (fear of missing out) and buy. Eventually, the whales lock in and the coin's value drops. This can be considered a move to take advantage of crypto whale psychology.

Some typical examples of influence on community psychology include Elon Musk, Michael Saylor with coins like Dogecoin, Bitcoin...

However, tracking the trading process of crypto whales still gives investors many different benefits, typically predicting market sentiment. For example, in some cases where whales transfer large amounts of assets to the CEX exchange, there are two cases:

Profit taking from assets and coin value decreases.
Move to CEX to divide assets into multiple wallets and continue to accumulate assets. The value does not change too much or increase gradually.
Therefore, monitoring the whales' activities can help users change their positions and strategies to suit themselves.

Several tools track crypto whales
There are currently many applications that help users track the on-chain whales and fluctuations in the number of crypto whales. Below are two projects that stand out in helping users keep abreast of crypto whale movements:

Arkham: On-chain vetting platform for investment funds and influential individuals in the crypto market. Arkham's highlight is its easy-to-use interface, complete specifications... at the same time, the project has just updated the on-chain functionality of the Lending/Borrowing platforms, one of whales' favorite financial tools. .
Glassnode: Tool to help users predict the trend of the crypto market through the number of whales, miners... The platform even has an inflow - outflow index of CEX.
In addition, users can check on-chain on some prominent platforms such as Nansen or NFTScan - an on-chain checking platform for NFTs.

For example, in the Wintermute foundation, users can use Arkham to track Wintermute. First, log in to the Arkham website. Then, find Wintermute.

In the lower right corner of the screen, users can find transactions over 1 million USD. First, click on the symbol next to USD and place the minimum amount of 1 million USD.

Wintermute Whale Investigation Guide.
Finally, users can see that crypto whale Wintermute is trading heavily in two tokens, TON and ETH. The majority of these funds transfer ETH Go to CEX and provide USDC/ETH pair liquidity at Uniswap.