What are crypto whales?
Simply put, crypto whales are individuals or organizations that own a large amount of a coin or non-fungible token (NFT) collection. The size of the holding has to be large enough to cause a ripple effect on the price of the coin or NFT if the holder sells it all at once.
The threshold of determining whether an altcoin holder is a whale or not depends on the market size of the coin in question. As such, although $10 million worth of BTC is the threshold for identifying bitcoin whales, the minimum requirement may be lower for altcoins, especially those with small market capitalization.
- Market capitalization, also called a market cap, is a metric that shows the relative size of each cryptocurrency. To calculate the market cap, multiply the current price of each coin by its circulating supply (that is, the total number of coins in circulation).
For example, the market cap of bitcoin at the time of writing this article is around $469 billion when you multiply its price (as of writing, $24,300) by its circulating supply (19.3 million BTC). Because bitcoin has the largest market cap, bitcoin investors need to hold a sizable amount of bitcoin in dollars to be considered whales.
Most other cryptos don’t come close to bitcoin’s market cap, so holders will need far less to be considered a whale. For example, Polygon's MATIC has a $10 billion market cap while dogecoin (DOGE) is at $9.5 billion, so it would take under $1 million in either to qualify as a whale.
NFT whales are entities that own a large number of NFTs, ideally of the same collection, though often NFT whales own many high-value blue-chip NFTs such as Bored Apes, CryptoPunks, Moonbirds and others. A collector who owns a significant fraction of an NFT collection is an NFT whale. For instance, if a collection consists of 1,000 NFTs, an individual or organization that holds 50 of such NFTs would likely be considered a whale.