Ever wonder who’s really in charge when it comes to NFTs? A whole different game is going on at the top while most of us are stuck deciding whether to spend 0.05 ETH on the latest drop. The whales NFT community, those enigmatic collectors who quietly reshape the market while dropping six and seven figures like it’s no big deal, is orchestrating a complete reshaping of the market. It’s as if a secret society of whales operates in the background.
Big NFT whales have a unique narrative. They are not just faceless crypto millionaires flaunting their wealth; they’re veterans who’ve been around from the beginning. They snapped up huge portfolios when no one else cared, and now a single one of their moves affects the entire space. The ecosystem has its own celebrities: Pranksy, for one, whose purchases everyone tracks; and Vincent Van Dough, whose sales can send floors into the stratosphere.
There’s no more room for wild, unchecked speculation. What we have now are the top NFT whales, smart money, better tools, and lessons learned from the 2022 crash. The top NFT whales still spend big, but every move is purposeful.
Who Are NFT Whales?
For one, if we are to consider NFT whales, they are nothing like the typical collectors who strut around Discord flaunting their newest token. In fact, these people have old portfolios that could buy themselves houses. We're talking millions of dollars in digital assets, sometimes spread across thousands of pieces.
But it's not just about the money. Most whales got their start early, buying CryptoPunks for $100 when everyone thought they were crazy. They understood something the rest of us missed, and that early conviction paid off in ways that seem impossible now.
Today's whale scene is different, though. You've got the OG collectors who've been here since 2017, but you're also seeing family offices and crypto millionaires treating NFTs like fine art investments. The standard for whale status just keeps going up; having one costly asset doesn’t qualify anymore. To make a significant impact, you need deep holdings in a few different collections.
What's Happening in NFTs This Year
Unlike the wild and unrestrained NFT scramble of 2021, the world of NFTs in 2025 paints an altogether different picture. In those early days, people would buy whatever existed, driving even the most novice launches. Now the market is much more picky, looking for NFTs that offer something real, meaningful, and culturally significant.
With the global NFT market estimated to have reached around $40 billion in Q1 2025, institutional money is finally taking NFTs seriously. But this is not the reckless speculation of the past bull run; it’s long-term investment capital. Family offices are allocating portions of their portfolios to blue-chip NFTs, and corporate treasuries are starting to hold pieces for their balance sheets.
The infrastructure has caught up, too. Think back to the early days of NFT purchasing and the frustration of slow, derpy sites and failed purchases. Today, powerful tools, better wallets, and checkout-friendly NFT stores round out the ecosystem to deliver a pleasing purchasing experience.
Ethereum's Layer 2 solutions bring increased speed at a lower cost, and Bitcoin Ordinals, for NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, have both introduced new categories of and premium digital assets. However, the largest collectors still prefer the Ethereum mainnet for its liquidity and prestige. Below you’ll see the NFT whales to watch in 2025.
NFT Whales List for 2025
Pranksy: The Day Trader Who Never Sleeps
If you want to understand how to make money in NFTs, study Pranksy. This isn't someone who bought a few Punks and held on for dear life. Pranksy has sold 2,350 of their purchased NFTs for 3,433 ETH ($7.94 million), making them one of the most profitable traders in the space. His portfolio value is currently 141.05 ETH, which is equal $652.7K today.
What’s astounding about Pranksy is the quantity. It’s more than 5,000 NFTs headlined by collections you’d expect. And it’s not just the blue chips because with Pranksy, it’s also 2,100 CryptoKitties and 1,450 Avastars. If Pranksy purchases anything, it usually indicates that the collection has potential.
Pranksy’s method is straightforward yet demands significant funds: pinpoint promising projects early on, purchase in large quantities during the mint or shortly thereafter, and then sell selectively as prices increase. And for the rest of you curious about how to track NFT whales’ purchases, it’s more or less market makers with less art and more spreadsheets.
VincentVanDough: Old Money Meets New Art
VincentVanDough personifies the conservative whale philosophy of investing, which entails sticking to proven methods, steering clear of buzz, and zeroing in on collections with established returns. Not only does their CryptoPunks collection boast multimillion-dollar value, but they have also prudently invested in Art Blocks and other generative projects that have demonstrated long-term viability. VincentVanDough has 1228.73 ETH, which is worth around 5.7 million dollars.
When VincentVanDough makes a move, it carries weight because they're not chasing trends. They're making calculated bets on digital assets they believe will hold value over decades, not months. It's the NFT equivalent of buying IBM stock in 1960.
Machi Big Brother: The Ultimate BAYC Bull
Nobody has bet harder on a single collection than Machi Big Brother has on Bored Apes. With 135 BAYCs, they're one of the largest individual holders of what's arguably the biggest NFT collection ever created. For collectors and investors learning how to track NFT whales, Machi is a prime example of how a single player can influence the market. Machi Big Brother has 2,216.3 ETH, which is worth 10.3 million.
This is either genius or madness, depending on how you look at it. Machi's concentration strategy has generated enormous profits, but it also means their financial fate is tied to one collection. When BAYC pumps, Machi wins big. When it dumps, well... let's just say they feel it more than most.
How Whale Moves Shake Up the Market
Here's something most people don't realize: whale activity isn't just about individual transactions. It's about psychology, momentum, and market validation all rolled into one. When someone drops $500K on a collection, they're essentially putting their reputation on the line and saying, "this is worth paying attention to."
The mechanics are pretty straightforward. Large purchases remove supply from the market, which pushes floor prices up. But the real impact is psychological. If Pranksy buys something, thousands of smaller collectors assume there's alpha they're missing. When fear of missing out sets in, volume spikes, and a collection that was previously dead in the water starts trending on Twitter.
Social media amplifies everything. Most whales are active on Twitter, sharing their thoughts and occasionally their purchase decisions in real time. In the NFT space, a single tweet from a reputable collector can generate more volume than a six-figure marketing campaign, particularly if it originates from the prominent NFT collectors that drive the market.
Whales provide an important element that most people overlook: liquidity. In the bear markets, when everyone stops trading, whales keep on trading. They provide the liquidity that smaller collectors need to exit or enter positions.
The timing aspect is fascinating, too. Data consistently shows that whale accumulation precedes major price movements by weeks or months. Either these collectors have better information, better analysis, or they're just better at spotting trends before they become obvious.
How to Find NFT Whales and Track Their Moves
The tools for tracking whales have gotten insanely good over the past few years. What used to require manual blockchain analysis and Excel spreadsheets can now be done with a few clicks. Here's how to see what NFT secret society of whales are buying and selling in real-time.
Nansen.ai has earned a reputation for being the most advanced whale tracker, and it's not hard to see why. If you’ve ever wondered how to find NFT whales, their Smart Money dashboard is a powerful place to start. It spots wallets linked to whales and alerts you as soon as they make a move. The tagging mechanism is extremely thorough, you can literally track specific collectors and know exactly what they are purchasing and offloading.
Whale tracking is a feature of OpenSea Pro. You can track specific wallets and be alerted when they make transactions. Furthermore, because of the integration with OpenSea's enormous database, you also get up-to-the-minute data for practically every popular collection.
DappRadar uses a different approach by concentrating on overall market patterns and providing fixed-interval whale summaries. Their reporting is structured from a "whale purchased X" format toward trying to understand what these activities imply for the market sentiment.
Arkham Intelligence is the new kid on the block, but is getting a lot of attention precisely because it's free. The tracking and analysis of wallets and transactions, for a no-subscription tool, are quite good.
NFTGo focuses on whale leaderboards and portfolio tracking. Would you like to know which collectors have the most valuable positions spanning different collections? This is the tool for you.
Also, don't overlook Twitter and Discord. A number of whales are quite active on social media and are sharing.
The pros combine multiple tools. Automated alerts from Nansen, social media monitoring on Twitter, and regular check-ins with portfolio trackers create a comprehensive picture of whale activity that individual tools can't provide alone.
The Bottom Line
NFT whales aren't going anywhere. If anything, they're becoming more influential as the market matures and institutional money enters the space. The cowboys of 2021 are becoming the sophisticated investors of 2025, bringing longer-term thinking and better strategies to their collecting.
Each whale represents a different philosophy. Pranksy shows that active trading can work if you have the capital and knowledge. Vincent Van Dough proves that sticking to blue-chips is a viable long-term strategy. Machi Big Brother demonstrates that concentration can pay off, even if it's risky.
Tracking tools were never better, but entirely following whales may be only one piece of the puzzle. Most of the time, it is more important to understand why they bought something than just knowing they bought it.
Expect whale behavior to continue its evolution as we take a deeper plunge into 2025. There is greater refinement of the market, increased competition, and rising prices. The one thing that continues to remain unchanged from the past is that when whales move, everybody else takes note of it.
Watching a whale's activities deserves to be part of your research process, whether you are trying to make it as a collector or perhaps simply trying to figure out how this crazy market is supposed to work. Just keep in mind that what works for someone who has millions to throw around might not necessarily translate to your situation. Put whale intelligence as just one point of data among many, blend that with your analysis, and be sure you never invest money you could possibly need to survive.
The game keeps changing, but the whales keep winning. Maybe it is time to pay closer attention to how they actually do it.
Alex Shepel
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