Whale
Big player · Big hand · Large holder
A big investor who holds a very large amount of a coin or buys and sells in very large amounts at once; it can be a person, a fund or a company.
Simple explanation
Background: Korean investors call big players 고래 (whale) or 큰손 ("big hand"), and large single trades on Upbit and the other won exchanges are watched closely.
The name comes from the animal: something big makes big waves when it moves. There is no fixed line for how many coins or how much money makes a whale. Some blockchain analytics firms count as a whale any entity holding 1,000 BTC or more, where an entity is a cluster of addresses that appear to belong to one person or organization, and they leave out exchange wallets, which hold many customers' coins together.
Whales show up in two places. One is transfers on the blockchain. A large move from a personal wallet to an exchange is often read as getting ready to sell, and a large move out of an exchange as getting ready to hold. But exchanges also shuffle coins between their own wallets or to custodians, so a big transfer does not by itself mean buying or selling.
The other is large fills on exchanges. A whale buying at market sweeps through the sell orders on the order book across several price levels and pushes the price up; a big sell pushes it down. The same amount moves the price more on a coin with low trading value and a thin order book, so a sum that would go unnoticed in bitcoin can rock a thinly traded coin like a whale.
Copying whales is risky. A large fill is not guaranteed to be one person's order: it can be the same person buying and selling back and forth, an arbitrage trade chasing the kimchi premium, or a pre-planned split order. Some traders also place big orders on the book and cancel them before they fill, so actual fills say more than resting orders. Manipulating prices, for example by inflating volume or pushing the price up to lure others in, is banned under Korea's Virtual Asset User Protection Act.
Whales and the kimchi premium are linked. When whale buying piles up on a Korean exchange, the Korean price can run ahead of the overseas price and that coin's premium widens; heavy selling in Korea can shrink it or turn it into a reverse premium. When the premium is high, arbitrage selling of coins brought in from abroad can also look like whale selling. Big trades in stablecoins such as Tether are closer to swapping won for dollar tokens than to investing, so they are best read together with the Tether premium.
CoinGaja's Whale Trade Radar takes the official real-time trade data (WebSockets) that the four Korean exchanges, Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone and Digital X (formerly Korbit), publish for everyone, and shows the moments when large amounts trade at once on their won markets. Exchanges fill one big order in several pieces across price levels, so fills on the same exchange, in the same coin and on the same side (buy or sell) that follow one another within 1 second are merged into one order to estimate its real size. Merged orders of ₩5,000,000 (about $3,600) or more are kept for an hour and shown above the threshold you pick: ₩5 million, ₩10 million, ₩50 million or ₩100 million.
A trade that bought straight into resting sell orders counts as a buy (red), and one that sold straight into resting buy orders counts as a sell (blue). The page also shows whale buy and sell totals and the buy share over the last 5, 30 or 60 minutes, and the 10 coins with the largest whale trades, and you can narrow it to one exchange or one coin. Stablecoins such as Tether and USDC are left out by default and can be added with the "include stablecoins" button. The page is in Korean. Whale trades are a read on market mood, not investment advice.
Example
Three Upbit bitcoin buy fills within 1 second: ₩20,000,000 + ₩15,000,000 + ₩10,000,000 → shown as one order of ₩45,000,000 (about $32,100)
With the ₩10 million threshold it shows; with ₩50 million (about $35,700) it does not, since ₩45,000,000 < ₩50,000,000
A separate ₩3,000,000 (about $2,100) fill is under ₩5,000,000, so it is not recorded
Last 5 minutes: whale buys ₩600,000,000 (about $429,000), sells ₩400,000,000 (about $286,000) → buy share = 6 ÷ (6 + 4) = 60%
₩500,000,000 (about $357,000) of Tether (USDT) whale trades in the same 5 minutes is left out by default (add it with "include stablecoins")
※ Example numbers, for illustration only
See it on CoinGaja
Related terms
Comments · ask anything about this term
Comments
No comments yet.