The crypto market continues to waver as we transition toward the second half of the year amid a regulatory crackdown in the U.S. But as trading volume continues to dwindle across centralized exchanges, some big crypto whales are still trading.
We decided to take a look at what six major crypto whales’ wallets — a “whale” in investing or gambling denotes a player with a lot of capital in play — are doing: where they park funds and how their activity signals movement in the market, according to on-chain portfolio data from Nansen.
The wallets are worth a total of $493.6 million, with almost 98% of their wallets’ allocated on the Ethereum blockchain, the data showed. The wallets and their data were selected by Nansen to detail a series of active wallets; we will continue to explore other whale wallets over time to expand our sample set.
A majority of the wallets include “wrapped” crypto assets, which is a tokenized version of the original coin that holds the same value. For example, there’s bitcoin (BTC) and wrapped bitcoin (wBTC) and an investor would own the latter if they wanted to use bitcoin on the Ethereum network, which it doesn’t operate on. It can, though, through the wrapped version.
Here’s a look at six crypto whale’s wallets ranging from “smallest” to largest:
Crypto wallet 1 with $18.25 million net worth:
- Chain allocation:
- 98.31% on the Ethereum chain.
- Biggest token allocations:
- 85.55% is staked Ethereum (stETH) at $25.8 million.
- 6.44% is wrapped bitcoin (wBTC) at $1.94 million.
- About 5%, or $1.6 million, across ENS, UNI and MATIC.
- Roughly $27,000 in stablecoin USDT.
- Protocol allocation
- 94% held on Aave (lending protocol).
- About 6% held in wallet.
- Portfolio performance down 6.75% on the week
Crypto wallet 2 with $21.88 million net worth:
- Chain allocation:
- 99.44% on the Ethereum chain.
- Biggest token allocations:
- 71.39% is staked Ethereum (stETH) at $40.6 million.
- 22% is in stablecoin DAI at $12.5 million.
- About 5%, or $2.9 million, across CUNI, UNI, CRV, wETH, CVX, MKR.
- Protocol allocation
- 64% held on Aave.
- 25% on Compound.
- 5.59% held in crypto wallet.
- Portfolio performance down 5.5% on the week
Crypto wallet 3 with $27.83 million net worth:
- Chain allocation:
- 100% on the Ethereum chain.
- Biggest token allocations:
- 99.99% is staked Ethereum (stETH) at $55.72 million.
- Less than $4,000 is ether (ETH).
- Less than $100 in stablecoins DAI and USDT.
- Protocol allocation
- 99.99% held on Aave.
- Less than 0.01% in crypto wallet.
- Portfolio performance down 6% on the week
Crypto wallet 4 with $97.27 million net worth:
- Chain allocation:
- 100% on the Ethereum chain.
- Biggest token allocations:
- 57.2% is ether (ETH) at $55.6 million.
- 42.75% is wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) at $41.58 million.
- Less than .1% is held in stablecoin USDT.
- Protocol allocation
- 100% held in crypto wallet.
- Portfolio performance down 1.25% on the week
Crypto wallet 5 with $121.77 million net worth:
- Chain allocation:
- 100% on the Ethereum chain.
- Biggest token allocations:
- 38.5% is ether (ETH) at $46.91 million.
- 32.27% is Rocket Pool (RPL) at $39.29 million.
- 28.21% is wrapped ether (wETH) at $34.35 million.
- Less than 1%, or $860,695, is held in USDC.
- Protocol allocation
- 99.91% held in crypto wallet.
- Portfolio performance down 4.1% on the week
Crypto wallet 6 with $206.86 million net worth:
- Chain allocation:
- 94.2% on the Ethereum chain.
- 3.9% on Arbitrum chain.
- Biggest token allocations:
- 61.57% in wrapped ether (wETH) at about $127.32 million.
- 14.55% in MKR at $30 million.
- 12.87%, about $26.64 million, held in stablecoins USDC, USDT and DAI.
- Biggest protocol allocations
- 37.37%, or $77.3 million, held on lending pool Morpho.
- 26.6%, or $55 million, held in crypto wallet.
- 22.1%, or $45.72 million, held on Uniswap.
- Portfolio performance down 3% on the week
The takeaway
All the portfolios are down on the week, which makes sense given the crypto market’s shaky nature, and almost all are solely allocated on Ethereum’s chain, making it the dominant place by a landslide for investors.
Across the six wallets, 97.55% were allocated to the Ethereum chain, with less than 3% on Arbitrum and Optimism chains. So it makes sense that the biggest token allocations all pertained to Ethereum with wrapped ether, staked ether and ether making up 69% of the six wallets’ $493.6 million total. After Ethereum, wrapped bitcoin composed 7.66% of the total allocation across the wallets.
Overall, this means the whales are generally risk-off, given the majority are holding liquid staking tokens, stablecoins and wrapped bitcoin and ether, signaling a conservative mindset.
What was surprising, though, were the six wallets’ lack of stablecoin allocations. Only crypto wallet 2 and 6 had a notable amount held in stablecoins, at 22% and 12.87%, respectively. This shows that these whales have a stronger appetite and are actively investing in the market, even if they’re defaulting to staking, opposed to watching from the sidelines with their money held in a (supposed to be) stable way.
Wallet 4 and 5 hold the majority of their funds in their crypto wallets, while others preferred to hold their tokens on protocols to (hopefully) gain passive income. Half of the wallets are also staking a majority of their portfolios, which is a common activity across whales. Crypto staking can provide returns, but if the asset being staked drops in value, then the rewards will also drop; there is no guarantee that rewards will offset any potential declines in value of the staked asset. So the mass amount that these three crypto wallets are staking signals that they might believe that these investments are going to be in the green long term.
It also makes sense that the wallets that are staking their assets through a protocol like Aave, which provides users noncustodial liquidity markets that can earn interest (currently around 6% APR). While there’s a number of liquidity protocols out there, Aave seems to be leading the ranks here for the whales. The comparison I make to this is: I shop at Target and Walmart, but I prefer one over the other, even though they provide similar experiences.
In general, digital asset investment products saw outflows of $88 million, marking eight consecutive weeks of outflows worth a total of $417 million, according to CoinShares’ weekly report. “We believe that this is monetary policy related, with currently no clear end in sight to interest rate rises, leaving investors cautious,” the report stated. This week, Ethereum, had outflows of $36 million, which is the largest seven-day outflow since the Merge in September.
Typically, the crypto market is looked at holistically by tracking volume, trading activity and other metrics. But by looking at a handful of wallets, we can see what some whales are doing, which matters given how much capital they control compared to the average retail trader. Regardless of how each of these wallets initially got its net worth, their current activity points to a more conservative approach, something traders tend to do when in a bear market as tokens become less predictable and there are fewer opportunities to get rich quick.
Given that we only looked at six crypto whale portfolios, it’s important to note that this is a small part of the market and should not be used as financial advice. This was done to look at where whales are moving capital and what they’re doing amid the bear market — and how it’s paying off for them. As always, you should do your own research.
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