I got a lot of positive feedback on my post about What whales were doing in Statera (STA). So I decided to make a series out of these. I will take a look at some of the top cryptocurrencies and see what the whales are doing with these tokens, this will focus on three main points:
- Are they buying or selling the crypto
- What other cryptos are they buying or selling
- What does this mean for the crypto and others as a whole
What is Chainlink (LINK)? It is a decentralized oracle, an oracle is an instrument that brings data from the real world into the digital world. Want to start a sports betting token? You can use Link to bring games scores on chain and settle bets. Want to create a crypto linked to the price of gold? Link can monitor the price of gold and provide you the data to adjust the price of your token. This is most easily seen in the implementation of Synthetix (SNX) using Link to start doing it’s oracle data management. SNX let’s you buy a share of the Nikkei or an ounce of gold by owning a “Synthetic” asset that represents the price of that share of an index or ounce of a resource (so they need to know the price of those things in the real world to price the synthetic asset correctly). If you start creating cryptocurrency solutions for insurance, loans on real world assets, real world financial instruments, etc. you will likely use an oracle to pull real world data and Link is the biggest oracle around, currently.
So, onto the whales of Link, what are those who have invested six figures into Link doing with Link and with other cryptos? You can go to the contract address then click on "holders" to check my work and look for yourself.
First off, an overview of addresses, there is obviously a healthy spread of Link, it is held by 157,675 wallets. We just broke 100 million Ether addresses in all, which means 0.15% of all Ether holders also hold Link. Four addresses that all seem to be held by the Chailink team hold 55% of Link. Binance holds 6% of all Link. Huobi holds .33% and OkEx holds .13%. Which really shows how absolutely massive Binance is in this game, they have 18x more Link than the next exchange on the list!
On to the whales, finding whales is much more difficult than with a small token like STA, if you look at the top 50 addresses A LOT are exchanges (sometimes they are not clearly marked as exchanges). I don’t want to know what exchanges are doing and honestly I don’t want to know what people like Tim Draper or Novigratz are doing, we all know they are accumulating and buying. I want to know what smaller whales are doing that are active in markets, plugged into midcap cryptos, and can give smaller investors like us some signposts. So at first I instantly went to see who was holding $1,000,000 Link and I instantly ended up in one of Kraken’s Link wallets, so I hadn’t gone low enough. Next stop was $600,000 where I hit one of Binance’s wallets. Our last stop is $500,000 (125,000 Link) where we may have found a pod of whales, let us begin:
253rd (253rd biggest holder) 0xd5 ($520,000 Link holdings): Their first buy of Link was Jan. 2018, only buying 19,000. They then bought steadily over the years to their current stack of over 125,000.
Biggest Holdings: Matrix AI Network, Dragonchain, and STK. Shame they had some LRC but sold, might’ve been the best performer after Link.
Honorable Mentions: It looks like this was an ICO hunter, their first buys were Nebulas (likely Rest in Peace), Dragonchain (RIP), Loopring (alive, but they didn’t hold on), IoT Chain (RIP), Simple Token (RIP). ICO hunting wasn’t fruitful for this one...except that Link ICO which made up for the rest.
254th (0xe1) ($525,000): bought 125,000 tokens off Binance a year ago hasn’t moved an inch, no other holdings, all Link all day. Very bullish for Link, someone buying a lot recently and holding.
255th (0x97) ($507,341): Bought 6,000 tokens Sep. 2017 and 12,000 Oct. 2017, has been steadily accumulating since, appears to have sold off $260,000 worth on Binance about 3 months ago, holding the rest.
Biggest Holdings: Kyber (KNC), Monolith (TKN), OMG Network (OMG), Tether (USDT), Golem (GNT)
Honorable mentions: Got in on the Request (Req), Kyber (KNC), and ChainLink ICOs
256th (0x06) ($504,900): Diamond fucking hands, got 124,800 tokens in what appears to be the token sale (9-24-2017) and hasn’t moved an inch since, not one token.
Biggest Holdings: ZRX, Kyber, OMG, ENJ, Bat
Honorable mentions: Request, Icon, Funfair
257 (0xf7) ($499,000): 733,000 tokens on 9-20-2017 sold 230,000 last June then continued to sell around 10,000-50,000 every month or so
Biggest Holdings: Atomic and Kyber
Honorable Mentions: also small holdings of Neumark NEU and Loom. Got in on the ICOs of: Chainlink, OMG, Kyber, and Request.
258 (0xd41) ($498,000): Bought around 250,000 January-March 2017, bought 10,000-20,000 every month (almost looks like they set up a recurring buy) over the next few years
Biggest Holdings: Only Link
Honorable Mentions: Looks like he sold about 350,000 Link a year ago when it jumped to $1 in May 2019 on Binance, which was just ONE MONTH before it skyrocketed to $3, that’s the difference between selling for $350,000 and $1,050,000! He held on for two entire years and then sold one month too early, missing out on $700,000 in profits...my condolences, seriously, not joking, that is really sad, I feel for the guy… At least he has $350,000 he sold plus his current $498,000 so almost a million, not bad!
259 (0xe7) ($498,000): Bought in December 2017 off Binance, 10,000-20,000 tokens at a time for a whole year, then stopped. Sold about 20,000 Link over the last year, holding pretty steady though.
Honorable Mentions: Another address with just Link
260 (0xd0A) ($498,000): Bought 100,000 in January 2018, 23,000 in April 2018, sold 2,000 in February 2020.
Honorable Mentions: Another Link only Address
261 (0x58) ($498,000): All Link all day, bought over 100,000 in November 2017, hasn’t moved a muscle since.
262 (0xb0) ($497,000): Bought 160,000 November 2019 sold 20,000 February 2020. All Link all day.
263 (0x46) ($497,000): Bought 120,000 September 18 hasn’t moved an inch since
Biggest holdings: DMG
Just for fun I went back to the top holders and tried my best to find a whale among all the exchange accounts, it took me literally 52 addresses but I do believe I found a blue whale:
53 (0x19) ($4.2 Million): bought some more recently 200,000 July 2019 400,000 Nov-Dec. 2019. Very bullish, a whale who continues to buy a ton and is holding.
Other holdings: Link, POWR ($2.8 million), ZRX (800K), OMG (600K), BAT (600K), ENJ (600K), HOT (500K), ENG (230K), QSP(230K), FUN(230K)
Honorable mentions: this account has 26 million dollars on it (I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being an exchange but it was picking up tokens like Po.et and Dragonchain over a year ago and had a lot of back and forth with different exchanges, so it seems like an individual). This “individual” has picked up over TEN THOUSAND Ethereum in the past year and is holding over 65,000 Ether currently, 15 million dollars in Ether currently.
55 (0xC3) ($4.1 Million): Bought 1.5 million Link on Binance February 2018, this man had a strong hunch that Link would be something and went all in, has sold a little bit here and their since but mostly holding steady.
Other Holdings: BAT ($143,000), OMG ($137)
Honorable mentions: He/she bought 1.5 million link at 42 cents in the bottom of a GINORMOUS bear sell off in February of 2018. He spent over $500,000 on crypto in one of the darkest moments of crypto, this investor has some mettle, some real fucking mettle.
Takeaways
A surprising amount of accounts bought multiple years ago and didn’t move an inch, it seems a lot of the big holders are veterans who have been in this for a while and choosing to continue to hold. This is bullish for Chainlink, a lot of the early believers are looking at 2,200%-3,000% gains (going from $15,000 invested to $500,000) and still holding. Our one very sad case of selling one month too early shows that this type of holding may be smart. It is always good to lock in gains and sell some of your stack when it goes up, but a knee jerk sell off half or more of your stack may never be a good call, or it could be, you never know if it will shoot up then crash back down (it would’ve been a smart call for all the other cryptos that are down 90% from their all time highs).
There are A LOT of “whales”, holder number 250 is still holding half a million dollars in Link. Again you have people who could be cashing out a lot of money and aren’t. People think there is still a lot of room left to run in Link, or at least that it is a “safe” investment. One thing this list doesn’t catch is all of the whales who have cashed out and are now sitting with their fat profits, so this is definitely a “survivorship” or “holder” bias. That being said you’re looking at 250 people who are happily holding over half a million dollars in Link (minus the many exchanges that are in the top 250 addresses). Holder number 1,000 is holding $232,000 in Link, so the top 1,000 are all holding six figures in Link and not selling, again, another bullish sign.
A mass majority of Crypto projects are failed or still in the dog house. Many of these addresses secondary holdings are doing TERRIBLE or are now defunct. The winners in this space are really one in a hundred if not one in a million. But if you get that one winner it sure pays out. Yes, you may lose all $1,000 on Req, Dragonchain, and IST, but that $1,000 you put on Link is now $25,000. However, you have to hold for the long term.
What other Cryptos are they buying? Honestly, it’s hard to tell, there was no clear trend. Request Network came up a lot, but it was one of the hottest ICOs of 2017 and hasn’t delivered on that promise. Funfair came up a lot and the concept has some legs (online casino), but it also hasn’t lived up to it’s potential (yet). Kyber, OMG, and BAT were some that came up the most that also seem the most stable, so if you want to follow Link whales those three may be the best bets. Some other ones that stood out just because I hadn’t heard of them before were POWR, HOT, and NEU (our biggest whale had A LOT of POWR). Might read up more on those. The 0x19 whale also bought an incredible amount of Ether, looks like he’s gearing up for the next bull run, if we see $1,000 Ether he will be sitting on $60 Million in just Ether, a true whale by any account. This was an interesting finding too, none of these addresses (other than that one whale) had more Ether than Link, they are either holding their Ether on another address or just don’t invest as heavily in Ether.
What we saw with almost all addresses is that buying and holding is likely your best strategy. Almost every address I looked at had bought Link more than a year ago and a mass majority bought 2 to 3 years ago, you have to hold on for a while to see the astronomical gains Chainlink has seen. Stay steady, stay strong. At the same time though, have an exit strategy, know what your number is and be ready to get out (we saw how important that was in the 2017 bull run). If you believe in a project at least take out a bit to protect yourself from downside, unless you just want that one big jackpot to change your life (not recommended, but not impossible).
