{"slug":"whale","term":"Whale","category":"Whales & On-Chain","definition":"A whale is a wallet or entity holding enough of a coin to move its price with a single trade — typically 1,000+ BTC for Bitcoin, or a top-100 holder for smaller tokens. Whale moves matter because thin order books can't absorb large orders, so exchanges, funds, and OTC desks leave visible footprints on-chain.","street":"The guy whose market order is your entire candle.","depth":["The working cutoffs: roughly 1,000+ BTC on Bitcoin, 10,000+ ETH, or a top-100 address on smaller tokens — where one wallet can hold 2-3% of supply. But the biggest 'whale' wallets on any rich list are exchange cold wallets and ETF custodians holding client coins, not one person's stack. So the first question on any big move is who moved it: a labelled custodian rotating storage, or an unlabelled wallet depositing to an exchange.","The trap is trading the headline. '5,000 BTC moved to Binance' fires an alert, retail shorts, and it turns out to be the exchange shuffling its own wallets. Backtests — ours included, across 60 coins — keep finding the same thing: whale-flow signals predict volatility, not direction. Big prints tell you a move is coming, not which way. Use them to tighten risk and wait, not to pick a side on someone else's transfer."],"live":{"label":"Watch the big prints live","href":"/tools/whale-alert"},"related":["exchange-netflow","wallet-labels","otc-desk","dormant-supply"]}