Whale

A whale is a wallet or entity whose crypto holdings are large enough that a single trade can move the market. There is no official cutoff, but industry convention puts the bar around 1,000 BTC or more for Bitcoin, roughly 10,000 ETH for Ethereum, and analytics platforms often use a relative measure instead: any address holding at least 1% of a coin's circulating supply.

Because blockchain activity is public, whale wallets can be watched in real time. Services such as Whale Alert flag transfers above set thresholds the moment they confirm, and traders read the direction of the flow for clues: coins moving onto an exchange are often taken as a sign a sale is coming, while a transfer into a private wallet suggests accumulation. The same balance change can just as easily be an exchange reserve shuffle, a custodian rebalancing, or an ETF issuer's routine flow, so not every alert reflects a real trading decision.

• A single sell order from one address once triggered a sharp market drop, giving rise to the term Bearwhale.
• Many whales are simply early adopters or miners who never touch their coins, not active traders.
• Because whales concentrate so much supply, their moves can spook smaller holders into selling at a loss.

Watching whale wallets has become its own niche of crypto analysis, sitting alongside broader on-chain metrics as a way to gauge market sentiment before it shows up in price.