With a single floor sweep 🧹, whales have the ability to drastically impact a collection and its trading volume. [insert NFT whale] has 50 GhostkidDAO NFTs, 30 Genesis Genopet Habitats, and 24 Cardboard Citizens. Bots tracking wallets on the blockchain alert Discord members [insert NFT whale] bought an NFT on Magic Eden.
Smart money. When a whale enters a position, the price and market tends to follow suit. All eyes are on the collection. Demand rapidly rises. Floor prices often skyrocket. When Banks and Cross made their moves, Okay Bears floor price rose from 150 to over 200 SOL in a single night. On Frank’s birthday, Urkann swept DeGods to a 200 floor for the first time. Other NFT traders watch the whale — the moves a whale makes serve as bullish or bearish indicators.
HGE (aka @9x9x9eth) is an NFT whale
When he buys, people notice. We'll define “whales'' as the top 2% of wallets by trading volume. We ran the numbers, and this roughly amounts to a minimum of 1,000 SOL. NFT whales are the collection’s top holders. They hold a significant amount of NFTs, which has a great impact on the secondary market.
Depending on the chain, HGE utilizes different trading styles. Being the older chain, Ethereum was where it began. “On ETH, I made mistakes. Only buying what I really believe has value… I ended up with too many CryptoPunks.” On Solana, he learned. His strategy is simple. Diversify and conquer. “I buy almost every single collection that’s on the top market cap.” Recently, he swept the floor of one of the most prolific builders in the NFT space — Blocksmith Labs. “It’s like betting on all horses in a race. If any horse wins, I win.” Out of all his bags, he is most bullish on Okay Bears, which he uses as his pfp. Okay Bears has “everything to the right tune”. Good team. Check. Art. Check. Strong community. Check, check. One of HGE’s wallets holds 99 of them, while he has the rest of his stash on a couple of other wallets.
ME: is there a specific reason for doing so (i.e. security purposes)?
HGE: so it doesn’t look so scary lol
🪄 Whale Insights
- The top 1,000 users do 21% of all transactions on Magic Eden, while the top 10,000 users do 58% of all trading volume.
- The everyday Magic Eden user that actively trades (past 30 days) does an average total volume of 30 SOL.
- The average whale has a total buy volume of 1,100 SOL.
- Based on the current floor price of collections, whales hold around 8.4 million SOL worth in NFTs.
- Top ME trades: Communi3: Labs for 2,400 SOL. Boogle Gen 1 for 2,000 SOL. Okay Bears for 1,800 SOL.
- Top collections held by whales: Okay Bears, Trippin Ape Tribe, Portals
🐋 Watch Whales Move on Magic Eden
- Utilize our “Stats” tab. This allows you to visualize sell walls based on different SOL group sizes. When whales sweep, users can see the impact of the sweep and gauge the next floor price.
- Check the Trade History Chart (across all marketplaces) to see how many NFTs have been swept, at which price and when. Toggle between 1D, 7D and 14D timeframes to see how a specific collection mooned! This can act as buy/sell indicators.
- If you want to see who the top collectors are and if your favorite whales are accumulating NFTs of a certain collection, check out the Holders Ranking Table.
Whether you’re a top market cap collection whale or degen mint whale, if there’s one take away from the whale’s playbook it’s conviction. Always DYOR. Double down on your high conviction plays. These are teams and builders you're bullish about. Whales tend to buy in bulk (and with our bulk buy feature, it’s as easy as adding NFTs to your “cart” and checking them all out at once 🤯) and they’re prepared to hold.
It’s called high conviction for a reason.
Thanks for reading,
📣 Eden in Data (6/1-7)
- Total secondary volume: 891,000 SOL
- Total collections listed: +230
- Total primary volume (Launchpad): 158,000 SOL
- Highest sold NFT: Degod, 850 SOL
- New wallets created: 29,600