Whale
A holder large enough to move markets — tracked obsessively on-chain, mimicked at your own risk.
A whale holds enough of an asset for their trades to move its price — thousands of BTC, or dominant shares of smaller tokens. Exchanges, funds, early adopters and (for many tokens) founding teams make up the class. On transparent ledgers, whale wallets are tracked obsessively — alert bots broadcast every large transfer.
Interpreting them is harder than following them: a large exchange inflow might precede selling — or be custody reshuffling; whales also deliberately paint misleading on-chain trails, and split holdings across many addresses. In thin markets, whale concentration is itself the risk metric: check holder-distribution charts before assuming a small token’s price reflects a crowd rather than three wallets.