How to find and track smart wallets in Crypto

Introduction

One of the most effective strategies for portfolio growth is to follow the practices of top traders and investors. In traditional markets, limited transparency often puts retail traders at a disadvantage, causing them to constantly lag behind emerging market opportunities. However, the crypto market offers a significant advantage to traders: the ability to monitor transactions 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 tags. These tools enable traders to understand the ‘who’ behind every onchain movement, providing valuable insights for informed decision making.

In this article, we will share how you can find, track and receive alerts on the activities of the best crypto traders, helping you grow your portfolio and ensure winning trades

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 meets the classic definition of Smart Money common in any market. Typically, top institutions and funds have access to more comprehensive knowledge than the average trader and often outperform the market. These addresses are manually identified by analyzing onchain transaction patterns and actual 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 goal is to identify the top performing wallets. Identification of such addresses is done automatically by predetermined criteria; our systems then scan the blockchain at regular intervals to name 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 at our methodology.

In the next few segments, we’ll cover how you can discover who is buying or selling Smart Money, how to find their wallets, and how to monitor their activity with Smart Alerts. If you prefer to watch a video, you can check out this video we 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 can ask every morning. Here’s how you can find the answer quickly and efficiently whenever you need it.

Homepage: Signals

Signals reveal unusual spikes in onchain activity across nine different categories, including Smart Money flows. By filtering for this, you receive a curated feed of abnormally large Smart Money token movements. This serves as a starting point for analyzing the actions that Smart Money takes with the marked tokens.

Here is an example of a workflow

We have seen a signal indicating that there has been a large outflow of ONDO tokens from Smart Money wallets. By clicking on the token and going to the Smart Money tab, we see that the majority of the outflows can be attributed to a single wallet. Using wallet profiler for token, we get a clear view that the outflow was the result of the trader selling their ONDO for ETH.

Homepage: Token Inflow

The token inflow widget, featured on the home page, highlights the largest net token inflow to Smart Money addresses over the past 24 hours. This may indicate increased interest in the token among Smart Money wallets. However, further analysis is needed to understand the reasons behind these inflows, as they may not only represent purchases. Inflows can also result from a fund receiving established tokens or transfers between wallets.

Here is an example of how to analyze the flow

In this example, RNDR was one of the tokens with the largest net inflow to Smart Money wallets. Examining the Smart Money tab for the token, it becomes clear that a Pantera Capital wallet is behind this move. Using wallet profiler for token, we can see that they received the tokens from a Coinbase Prime wallet. While the details of what happened on the exchange prior to the withdrawal remain unclear, this is not the first case of Pantera executing such a transaction. There have been four other incidents in the past three months, with the fund sitting on a 100% unrealized profit from the first three trades. The wallet holds over $11M in RNDR.

For traders looking for an overview with a longer time horizon, the ‘Smart Money Dashboard > Balance Tab > Token Holdings’ widget is designed for you. This widget provides a composite overview of the largest token holdings among Smart Money wallets, displaying both the percentage and dollar value changes over different time frames, as well as the count of Smart Money holders for each token

Smart Money: DEX Trading

Perhaps the simplest 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 past 24 hours. You can switch between buying and selling and filter for new tokens depending on your interests. A similar workflow to the one shown above can be used to gain deeper insights into who the wallets are that are 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 trade feed under that dashboard.

How to find smart wallets

Going deeper than comprehensive overviews of the entire Smart Money segment, some traders choose 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 right tools and knowledge.

Here are three ways to find Smart Money wallets worth following:

Smart wallets of tokens you care about

One of the best ways to find wallets that are relevant to you is by focusing on the major 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.

Additionally, analyzing the activity of top performing token holders can reveal wallets that have successfully rotated from one token to another. For example, researching the top Smart Money holders of FET in the past led me to discover ThetaTfuel, a Smart Money wallet that effectively capitalized on the AI ​​narrative (with over $2.5 million profit). This wallet then flipped its entire holdings in FTM at $0.69 and sold near the local high 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, published on March 15th.

Top performing traders

In Nansen’s Smart Money Trades widget, you get a curated overview of the top performing trades over the past week. This indicates wallets that have made significant returns, which serves as a strong hunting ground to find 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 over various time frames.

Build your own smart wallets

The two methods mentioned above are effective in tracking wallets identified as Smart Money. However, more advanced users interested in creating their own alpha list of wallets based on their specific criteria may find manual compilation too time-consuming. Smart Segments enables you to identify and label wallets according to the criteria you set in seconds.

Creating a smart segment is super simple. Enter the conditions you want and it automatically identifies Ethereum addresses that meet them and tags them accordingly. The list created is dynamic, constantly refreshing to ensure the list is up to date. The labels will be displayed on various dashboards where these wallets appear. Use the Nansen Profiler to get a comprehensive overview of the onchain activity of the entire segment.

How to Monitor Smart Money Activity in Crypto

Now that you have a solid understanding of how to identify Smart Money wallets and gain insight into their buying or selling activity, the next step is to monitor their activity so you can take action yourself.

There are two ways to do this:

Constantly check wallets and dashboards. Set up alerts sent to your Telegram, Discord or Slack.

Simplify 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 facilitates returning to tokens or wallets that interest you and serves as a notebook for your onchain exploration.

Set up Crypto Alerts

Most 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’s irrelevant to you, making manual monitoring ineffective even with enough 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 that they only trigger for transactions or onchain activities that matter to you. These alerts will be sent to your Telegram, Discord or Slack in real time once activated.

Example of what the warnings look like

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 one according to your interests.

The second method is more ad hoc and usually occurs while browsing the various dashboards and widgets within Nansen. Often, during your own research and due diligence, you may come across addresses that catch your eye. You can instantly set up alerts for these wallets via the right-click menu, 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.

Discover what smart money is doing today