Whale watching by address: how to follow any wallet without a subscription

A whale, for this guide, is an address that holds enough of a coin or a token that its moves are visible in the market. Whether it belongs to a fund, an exchange, a market maker or one early buyer is often unknown. What is known is every transaction it has ever made, because the chain publishes them. This is a guide to reading that public record: finding an address worth watching, following it in an explorer, getting told when it moves, and keeping the moves in context. Nothing here needs a paid dashboard, and none of it needs the whale’s permission.

Find an address worth watching

Three sources cover most cases. Token pages on explorers list the largest holders: the Holders tab on Etherscan for any ERC-20, the same view on Solscan for SPL tokens. The top rows are exchanges and contracts; the first unlabelled addresses below them are the whales. Labelled datasets do the guessing for you: Arkham and Nansen tag addresses as exchanges, funds and market makers, and the tags are heuristics rather than facts. And the market itself: a transfer big enough to move a price gets discussed within the hour, and the address is right there in the transaction. Write the address down with a note on why you picked it. Six months later the string alone means nothing.

Watch it in an explorer, for free

The explorers already do the watching; you only need an account. Etherscan’s Watch List takes any Ethereum address, lets you name it, and emails you on incoming transactions, outgoing ones or both, with a filter for token transfers. Solscan’s watch list does the same for Solana with a name tag and an in-or-out filter, up to ten addresses per account. For Bitcoin the equivalent is a watch-only wallet: import the address into a wallet app that supports it and it shows balance and history without ever holding a key. This is fine for one or two addresses. The limit is that every chain needs its own account, and every alert arrives without context.

Alerts with thresholds

When a raw feed is too noisy, two services filter by size. Arkham Alerts fire on transfers to or from an address or a labelled entity above a threshold you set in dollars or tokens, by email, Telegram or webhook, with a link to the transaction. Whale Alert is the public feed of large transfers across the major chains, with a paid tier for custom alerts, listed on its site at $14.95 a month after a seven-day trial as of 8 September 2026. Both tell you that something moved. Neither tells you what the holder owns now.

Reading a move

A transfer has three readable parts: direction, counterparty and size relative to the holder. Into an exchange deposit address is the classic sell signal, and it is wrong often enough to be dangerous: whales also deposit to lend, to post collateral or to withdraw on another chain. From an exchange to a fresh address is usually accumulation or custody housekeeping. Between two addresses with no exchange in the path is most often the same owner moving between wallets. Size matters more than direction: a fund moving 2 percent of its stack is rebalancing; moving 60 percent is a decision. That ratio needs the holder’s total, which is exactly where explorers stop and trackers begin.

Keep the moves in context

TrueHold reads any public address the way an explorer does, read-only, and shows what the holder owns across chains: tokens, DeFi positions and NFTs, totalled the same way as your own wallets. Paste the whale next to your portfolio and this morning’s transfer becomes a percentage of a known total instead of a number in a feed. TrueHold does not push alerts today; the explorer watch list or Arkham is the wake-up, and the tracker is where you look next. Setting an address up is covered in How to track any wallet address; the Solana specifics are in How to track a Solana wallet.

A note on watching others

Following a public address is what the chain was built for, and nobody needs to consent to it. Connecting that address to a named person is a different act, and so is harassing whoever you think it is. Watch wallets, not people, and treat every label as a guess that may be wrong.

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