Introduction
One of the most effective strategies for portfolio growth is to emulate the practices of top traders and investors. In traditional markets, limited transparency often places retail traders at a disadvantage, causing them to perpetually lag behind emerging market opportunities. However, the crypto market offers a significant advantage to traders: the ability to monitor trades and transactions in real-time. This capability is enabled by the transparency of blockchain networks and the use of analytics platforms that enrich the data with identity labels. These tools allow traders to understand the 'who' behind every onchain movement, providing invaluable insights for informed decision-making.
In this article, we'll share how you can find, track, and receive alerts on the activities of the best crypto traders, helping you grow your portfolio and secure winning trade
What is Smart Money in Crypto?
In short, 'Smart Money' in crypto refers to the top-performing market participants.
There are two main types of Smart Money:
Top-performing institutions, funds, and influential whales: This category adheres to the classic definition of Smart Money prevalent in any market. Typically, top institutions and funds have access to more comprehensive knowledge than the average trader and frequently outperform the market. These addresses are manually identified by analyzing onchain transaction patterns and real-world announcements, enabling the discovery of these entities' addresses.
Top-performing onchain market participants: This category is derived from the analysis of wallet addresses' performance across all major profitable crypto activities, such as trading, investing, yield farming, staking, and airdrop farming. The aim is to pinpoint the top-performing wallets. Identification of such addresses occurs automatically through predefined criteria; our systems then scan the blockchain at regular intervals to label addresses that meet these criteria.
For a more detailed insight into how we define and label Smart Money, check out our in-depth guide: What is Smart Money in Crypto? A Detailed Look into Our Methodology.
In the next few segments, we’ll be covering how you can discover what Smart Money is buying or selling, how to find their wallets and how to monitor their activity using Smart Alerts. If you’d prefer watching a video, you can check out this video we've created on the topic, if not, let’s get to it!
Discover What Smart Money Is Buying or Selling in Crypto
This is the first question you, as a trader, might ask every morning. Here's how you can find the answer quickly and efficiently whenever you need it.
Home Page: Signals
Signals reveal unusual spikes in onchain activity across nine different categories, including Smart Money flows. By filtering for these, you receive a curated feed of abnormally large Smart Money token movements. This serves as a starting point for analyzing the actions Smart Money is taking with the highlighted tokens.
Here’s an example of a workflow
We saw a signal indicating that there’s been a large outflow of ONDO tokens from Smart Money wallets. By clicking on the token and heading to the Smart Money tab, we see that the majority of the outflows can be attributed to a single wallet. By utilizing wallet profiler for token, we get a clear view that the outflow was a result of the trader selling their ONDO for ETH.
Home Page: Token Inflow
The token inflow widget, featured on the homepage, highlights the largest net token inflows to Smart Money addresses over the last 24 hours. This may indicate increased interest in the token among Smart Money wallets. However, further analysis is necessary to understand the reasons behind these inflows, as they may not solely represent purchases. Inflows could also result from a fund receiving vested tokens or transfers between wallets.
Here’s an example of how to analyze the flows
In this example, RNDR was among the tokens with the largest net inflows to Smart Money wallets. Upon examining the Smart Money tab for the token, it becomes evident that a Pantera Capital wallet is behind this movement. Using wallet profiler for token, we can see that they received the tokens from a Coinbase Prime wallet. While the specifics of what transpired on the exchange prior to the withdrawal remain unclear, this is not the first instance of Pantera executing such a transaction. There have been four other occurrences in the last three months, with the fund sitting on a 100% unrealised profit from the first three transactions. The wallet holds over $11M in RNDR.
For traders seeking an overview with a longer time horizon, the 'Smart Money Dashboard > Balances Tab > Token Holdings' widget is designed for you. This widget provides an aggregated view of the largest token holdings among Smart Money wallets, displaying both the percentage and dollar value changes across various timeframes, as well as the count of Smart Money holders for each token
Smart Money: DEX Trades
Perhaps the most straightforward widget, the Smart Money > DEX Trades > Buy/Sell widget highlights the tokens with the largest buying and selling volume by Smart Money wallets over the last 24 hours. You’re able to toggle between buys and sells and filter for new tokens depending on your interests. A similar workflow to the ones shown above can be used to get deeper insights into who are the wallets buying or selling each token.
For traders who want a live view of what Smart Money wallets are buying or selling, there is a live DEX trades feed below that dashboard.
How to Find Smart Money Wallets
Delving deeper beyond comprehensive overviews of the entire Smart Money segment, some traders opt to focus on specific wallets to closely monitor Smart Money movements that are most relevant to them. However, identifying these wallets can be time-consuming without the proper tools and knowledge.
Here are three ways to find Smart Money wallets worth following:
Smart Money Holders of Tokens You Care About
One of the best ways to find wallets that are relevant to you is by focusing on the large holders of tokens that you own or are interested in. These wallets provide potential buy or sell signals whenever they accumulate or take profit on their holdings.
Moreover, analyzing the activity of top token holders that are performing well can reveal wallets that have successfully rotated from one token to another. For example, examining the top Smart Money holders of FET in the past led me to discover ThetaTfuel, a Smart Money wallet that capitalized on the AI narrative effectively (garnering over $2.5M in profit). This wallet then rotated its entire holdings into FTM at $0.69 and sold near the local peak at $1.06 for FET, just a day before the announcement of the potential merger between Fetchai, SingularityAI and Ocean Protocol.
I shared the wallet in Nansen’s newsletter, along with two other interesting Smart Money wallets worth monitoring, which was published on 15 March.
Top Performing Traders
In Nansen’s Smart Money Trades widget, you get an aggregated overview of the top performing trades over the past week. This surfaces wallets that have made sizable returns, acting as a strong hunting ground for finding wallets worth following.
The first wallet on the list achieved a 5x return on INFRA in just four days and still holds $17.7K of the token. If sold at current prices, this would increase the total realized profit to a 7x return.
For traders who want a longer time horizon, the Top Traders widget below highlights the top-performing traders based on their ROI and absolute profit across various timeframes.
Curating Your Own Smart Money Wallets
The two methods mentioned above are effective for tracking wallets identified as Smart Money. However, more advanced users interested in creating their own alpha list of wallets, based on their specific criteria, might find manual curation too time-consuming. Smart Segments enables you to identify and label wallets according to the criteria you’ve set in seconds.
Creating a Smart Segment is super simple. Input the conditions you want and it automatically identifies Ethereum addresses that meet them, labeling them accordingly. The list created is dynamic, constantly refreshing to ensure the list is up to date. The labels will be displayed across various dashboards where these wallets appear. Utilize the Nansen Profiler to gain a comprehensive view of the onchain activity of the entire segment.
How to Monitor Smart Money Activity in Crypto
Now that you have a good understanding of how to identify Smart Money wallets and gain insights into their buying or selling activities, the next step is to monitor their activity so you can take action yourself.
There are two ways to do so:
- Constantly checking wallets and dashboards.
- Setting up alerts that get sent to your Telegram, Discord, or Slack.
Streamlining Your Constant Checks
For traders looking to streamline their constant checking, adding key widgets to your dashboard can consolidate everything into a single view.
Additionally, you can add wallets, tokens, and NFTs to your watchlist. This simplifies returning to tokens or wallets that interest you and serves as a notepad for your onchain exploration.
Setting Up Crypto Alerts
The majority of us can't be in front of a computer 24/7, and even if you could, it’s extremely difficult to keep an eye on every wallet, token, and entity that matters. Additionally, you’ll need to filter out activity that is irrelevant to you, making manual monitoring inefficient even with ample time.
Smart Alerts allow you to set up notifications for tokens, NFTs, entities, wallet addresses, and even smart contracts. You can adjust the settings of these alerts so they only trigger for transactions or onchain activities of interest to you. These alerts will be sent to your Telegram, Discord, or Slack in real-time, as soon as they're triggered.
Example of how the alerts look
There are two main ways to set up these alerts, with the first method being through the dedicated Smart Alerts page: https://app.nansen.ai/smart-alerts. Here, you can choose from eight different types of alerts and customize each according to your interests.
The second method is more ad hoc and typically occurs while you’re browsing the various dashboards and widgets within Nansen. Often, during your own research and due diligence, you might encounter addresses that catch your attention. You can immediately set alerts for these wallets via the right-click menu, thus eliminating the need to manually visit the dedicated Smart Alerts page.
Follow Smart Money, Become Smart Money
By understanding and tracking Smart Money, you position yourself to make more informed decisions, potentially leading to greater success in your crypto trading endeavors. As you dive deeper into the onchain world, your list of alpha wallets will continue to grow, expanding the data points and potential opportunities available to you.
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