.png)
GM explorers!
Welcome to The Map and the Territory, Nansen’s weekly alpha leak newsletter where we try to cut through the noise – the headlines, the tweets, and the mania – with onchain data in an effort to surface actionable signal.
This week we’ll be looking at an unannounced raise, Smart Money deciding what to do with an emerging Arbitrum altcoin, and some knicknacks from the team.
Let’s dive in!
A Strange Raise
If you haven’t already given deranzxc a follow, you should. The man is one of my favorite sources of alpha, and among the tools on his utility belt is that he’s unusually good when it comes to tracking stablecoin flows, especially as it pertains to spotting unannounced raises.
This week, he flagged a funding round in the $6.5 million ballpark flowing into olagg.eth – a hefty sum given it’s a bear market.
The recipient is a play to earn community focusing on the Hispanic market called Ola Guild Games, an affiliate of Yield Guild Games. YGG has been expanding with regionally-focused sub-DAOs as of late, with YGG SEA acting as another location-based play (and which contributed $100k to this OGG round).
The round stands out for two reasons: first, it’s a good chunk of change in any market conditions, but especially because of market turbulence and how poorly gaming has been performing as a subsector as of late – the Nansen Game-50 index is genuinely depressing:
However, aside from Bitscale and Infinity Ventures, there’s almost no recognizable names on the list, despite contributions ranging between $100k and $700k. Might be worth snooping around these wallets to identify some untagged wallets belonging to major YGG supporters, and keeping an eye out for when the fundraise announcement goes live – we’ll be able to identify some entity wallets based on who led the round.
I’d especially like to know the identity of 0xbd02c51150a4ab6ce97b9de2025644594f3e75b8 – let me know if you’ve got a guess!
Smart Money Fights Over GMX
The overall market is enjoying a relief rally, with DeFi tokens in particular on the receiving end of a healthy bounce. However, Smart Money addresses are by no means moving in unison on this move, with some positioning as if the bull is back on, while others fade this bounce aggressively.
Want to track how top-performing Smart Money accounts are managing the market bounce? Sign up for a Nansen plan today!
One battleground where this contrast is particularly evident is GMX. The Arbitrum-native spot and perpetuals exchange protocol has been on a tear as of late, up a remarkable 4x off its lows.
Once again citing deranzxc, however, some major names have been selling in droves, with Blocktower gradually selling down a mammoth position over the past few months, coinciding with the uptick in price:
However, a number of other notable individuals and institutions seem to think GMX has a bright future ahead. Eyeballing the top transactions from the past week reveals names such as sifu, Arthur Hayes (who appears to have some close connections to a particular Smart LP wallet!), and Ledger Prime, all of whom are accumulating or LPing:
The markets are choppy, and not even the most sophisticated players can choose a direction, especially on riskier plays like alts on emerging ecosystems. However, it’s in conditions like these where opportunity is found!
Odds and Ends
Our Education department has been busy giving the walkthroughs and tutorials sections of the website a facelift to bring them up to speed with Nansen’s latest features.
This week, Dan broke down Token God Mode, one of Nansen’s most popular and powerful features, with a deep dive into the would-be Opensea competitor, LOOKS. It’s worth a look for beginners just learning to use the platform, as well as for Nansen pros: https://www.nansen.ai/nansen-101/introducing-token-god-mode
Additionally, our intern Kate has started putting together summaries of our Office Hours episodes. Office Hours is one of the best ways to learn the platform and get inside the heads of power users, but not everyone has an hour to spare every week, so here’s a summary of the latest episode from the Nansen Head of Alpha Leaks, El Barto:
That’s all for this week, explorers! As always, reach out with comments or questions at andrew.thurman@nansen.ai