Nansen transcends your expectations of a blockchain analytics platform, and their suite of unique metrics is becoming an influential forecaster in the noisy crypto markets.
Having labeled and analyzed the activity of over 100 million Ethereum addresses, you can imagine the sheer quantity of correlations and causations they find. Nansen combines an intricate backend with real-time dashboards and alert systems for Ethereum and Polygon activity.
Data analytics is an interesting industry because it’s not what’s happening. It’s a recording of what’s just happened, almost like a lagging indicator - but it does influence what happens next.
This influence is compounded when the data involved rings true to the observers. Suppose ten principled technical analysts observe an inverse head and shoulder pattern form on a chart—their understanding of how & why inverse head and shoulder patterns will influence their next decision.
These patterns quickly become self-fulfilling prophecies and crowded trades.
You won’t be looking for inverse head and shoulders on Nansen, but you will develop an intuitive understanding of individual market participants’ behaviors while trend following in the aggregate.
Imagine having the exchange API keys to Jim Simmons’ portfolio or having access to your collection of NFT advisors simply by looking through the most profitable wallets and having notifications of their purchases sent directly to your private Telegram, Discord, or Slack channels.
The power lies in the eyes of the observer with Nansen. If you don’t know what you are looking for, you won’t find it, but if you’re savvy enough, the sky is the limit.
Features
Nansen is not for the faint of heart. To understand all of its features, you'll need at least an intermediate understanding of crypto's market structure, blockchains, digital wallets, smart contracts, stablecoins, generative NFT sets, and web3 in general.
It is also helpful to understand the cultural impact surrounding specific projects, specifically regarding NFTs. Culture is becoming a premium of its own.
For the full range of features, check out Nansen's website's resources or tune into their weekly office hours for more information.
Wallet Profiler
The backbone of Nansen's platform is its ability to analyze wallets and wallet activity. In doing so, they assign labels to wallets that meet specific requirements or exhibit certain behaviors.
There are 59 labels across eight categories. Each category has an emoji that you'll find associated with wallets in that category.
I've included a few labels below. To see the rest, click here.
There is a lot to learn by analyzing transactions on a blockchain.
For most, the anonymity, or pseudonymity, of transactions doesn't matter, but others may be alarmed by the accurate descriptions these algorithms can piece together.
The world of self-custody is a world based on transparency. If you choose to use a public blockchain or decentralized application built on a public blockchain, you decide to do so publicly. Nansen is just documenting it.
Smart Money Dashboards
Other core features lie within the Smart Money dashboards.
There are 5 🤓Smart Money designations.
Smart LP - Made more than US$100,000, providing liquidity and mining liquidity by staking pool tokens on Uniswap or SushiSwap.
Flash Boys - Wallets that have made multiple dex trades in a single transaction that are profitable.
0x_b1 - https://twitter.com/0x_b1.
Whale - One of the top 100 addresses by ETH balance without any other labels.
Fund - Public entity that invests and manages money in crypto.
You can see the last 24 hours of activity, which DEXes were used, recent transfers, and present token holdings of all these wallets.
In this case, 5 of the top 12 token holdings were stablecoins, and 3 of those were Aave interest-bearing.
You can see the data in the aggregate, as pictured above, or you can select individual wallets, like Wintermute's shown below. The following data sets are drawn from the activity in the Wintermute wallet involving the USDT token.
These are institutional flows. Retail investors always need detailed access to this granularity in traditional equity markets. For the most part, banking and market-making are opaque to the public.
For traders who know how to put 2 and 2 together, you might like Nansen. These screenshots are the tip of the iceberg in sorting through the options and data sets.
NFT Paradise
NFT Paradise begins with a simple data-driven explanation of the top project's activity in the last 24 hours.
The NFT Profit Leaderboard displays the all-time profits of a wallet.
The Epic NFT Collector, in 2nd place, has, in total, turned $836,000 into $10,909,500 with ETH at $3,500.
You can view all 950 transactions that have led to this 1,202% profit margin. You can also view the top interacting wallets, the history of incoming/outgoing tokens & ETH, exactly how much capital they have, and all the NFTs currently in the wallet.
One thing to note is that the Epic NFT Collector made massive transactions in December 2020 and January 2021. I recall Art Blocks beginning to enable the minting of many of their famous works at that time.
Well, I checked the Realized Gains section, and…
A nice 32,549% return of $10,167,500 in 9 months on Art Blocks NFTs.
Smart Alerts
Nansen's Smart Alerts let you know when an event you are interested in occurs.
You can create simple price alerts or more complex ones, like when a specific address creates a new contract, when tokens are transferred, or when transactions of a particular size are made.
Token God Mode
With tens of thousands of tokens, knowing what they're up to can take a lot of work. Token God Mode lets you see all the exchange (CEX & DEX) inflows and outflows, notable holders, Hodlers, and recent trades.
Hot Contracts
Hot Contracts are only for VIP users and could very well be worth your while.
You can sort the deposits by Smart Money to see precisely what they're doing and potentially why they're doing it.
Each contract is linked to Etherscan, so you can verify the source of the projects and decide if it's legitimate. This is self-custody, DYOR.
Pricing
Nansen is not free.
To write this, I started their 7-day $9 trial, and it's been well worth it. Their plans range from $149 - 2,500 / month or $1,400 - $27,500 / year.
For all the details, check out their monthly and annual pricing here.
Conclusion
The main goal that Nansen achieves is helping users find new opportunities.
These can be found by observing NFT minting activity, Smart Money movement, Hot Contracts, Smart Alerts on wallet addresses associated with Smart Money, etc. The platform is built for any institutional or retail investor aware of the digital assets revolution.
While there are many competitors in blockchain analytics, even other wallet labelers, Nansen stands out. They have unique offerings and achieve a relative niche product market fit at a scale and level of quality I haven't seen elsewhere.
With the 100s of millions of data points available, you can be sure you'll find something if you keep looking.
Nansen Links
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