The most searched keyword for all crypto-seekers in the last 24 hours has been "crypto crash," and yet savvy cryptocurrency traders are still making big jumps.
Data from blockchain analytics firm Nansen shows the daily net gains and losses for all smart money addresses trading NFTs. Since April 1, there have been 27 days of profitable NFT trading and 9 days of negative returns for smart money wallets.
Nansen considers a wallet to be smart money if it is "historically profitable," meaning it meets at least one of several conditions, including:
- It is among the top 100 addresses in terms of estimated profits from its current NFT portfolio and among the top 100 addresses based on an internal "Hodler score metric."
- At least 5x realized gains from multiple NFT collections minted in the last 60 months;
- Having made multiple profitable DEX trades in a single transaction;
- Belonging to an investment fund that invests and manages money in cryptocurrencies.
Since April 1, smart money has invested 4,864 ETH, returned a total of 17,581 ETH, and gained 12,717 ETH in NFT trades.
It is clear that smart money is not infallible, nor is every trade profitable, as the few red bars show (emphasis on few). The biggest loss for smart money wallets trading NFTs was recorded on May 1, the day Yuga Labs launched their "Otherdeed" NFT collection, where investors spent over 64,000 Ether on fees alone.
In the last 24 hours, $2.18 million worth of rETH and $0.46 million worth of aSTETH have flowed into wallets categorized by Nansen as "smart money."
Although the Fear and Greed Index, which takes into account various factors such as volatility, volume, dominance, and search engine trends to gauge market sentiment, shows that we are in a period of "extreme fear," the smart money is not sitting idly by considering that it has amassed the Ethereum derivatives rETH and aSTETH.
rETH is a token for Rocket Pools users that represents their locked ETH on the Ethereum Beacon Chain, and in comparison, aSTETH is Aave's revenue-generating token for stETH that represents stacked Ether on the Lido protocol.
Smart money inflows of rETH and aSTETH at a time when regular market participants are anxious show the attractiveness of Staked ETH for smart money.
In the same 24-hour period, gOHM worth about $2.8 million, the largest outflow among tokens tracked by Nansen, left a smart money address labeled "🤓 Smart LP: 0x413." At the same time, $2.2 million worth of OHM flowed into the same wallet, seen here.
Smart LP, one of Nansen's many smart money wallet labels, is identified as a wallet that earned at least $100,000 by providing liquidity to decentralized financial protocols (DeFi) SushiSwap and Uniswap, excluding so-called volatile losses.
Aside from this trade, just over $400,000 of APE, the governance token for ApeCoin DAO, was withdrawn from smart money wallets today, continuing the recent trend of unloading APE.
Although Yuga Labs' NFT collections have high minimum prices and consistently show massive volume activity, the associated token has not fared so well. Every day since May 2, APE has been one of the top tokens leaving smart money wallets. Between May 2 and May 6, APE worth a total of about $3.7 million flowed out of smart money wallets. During the same period, the price of APE fell nearly 23%, from a high of $17.21 to a current value of $13.26, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Nansen is one of many companies analyzing publicly available information on crypto transactions, though unlike Chainalysis and similar companies, its services are geared more toward giving investors an edge than helping law enforcement catch bad actors.
While cryptocurrency addresses on public blockchains appear as random strings of letters and numbers, Nansen uses algorithms, its own research and user-submitted information to draw conclusions about the entities behind pseudonymous wallets. It is important to note, however, that past performance is no guarantee of future results.