What Is a Whale?

Whales are often considered the opposite of a cryptocurrency fish or minnow, someone who holds insignificant amounts of cryptocurrencies and has limited ability to impact market prices.

Instead, whales are part of a special club of individuals and organizations who hold enough cryptocurrency to move its spot price on the market.

They tend to have an outside impact whenever liquidity is low, or higher volatility is high.

The biggest Bitcoin whales in the industry include Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and Gemini exchange co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. From an institutional standpoint, Tesla and MicroStrategy appear prominently on the list as they own hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin between them.

Large holders of BTC are often called whales because they prevent BTC fish from swimming smoothly in waters.

The Pareto Principle asserts that the top 20% owners of BTC hold more than 80% of BTC’s value in terms of dollars.

Bitcoin whales often set speculation trends for BTC fish to follow. This can often lead to a repeated cycle, where BTC fundamentals become disconnected from the fundamental drivers of cryptocurrency markets.

In several cases, nobody knows the real identity of some Bitcoin whales.

Australian businessman Craig Wright was sued in 2019 for allegedly holding more than 1.1 million BTC.

Some market watchers have speculated that Craig Wright may be the real identity behind the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.

Craig Wright says he helped create Bitcoin in collaboration with his friend Dave Kleiman.

A move of huge amounts of BTC, especially from older cryptocurrency wallets, often results in the speculation that Satoshi Nakamoto is active.

Crypto Whale Tracker

Many investors or traders track whale holdings and what they buy or sell, as whales are generally thought to be "smart money" and have more information over the run-of-the-mill retail crowd. There are numerous popular whale trackers sites, such as WhaleWatcher, WhaleStats, Watcher Guru and more.