Glossary
Whale (Crypto)
A holder of a very large amount of a particular cryptocurrency or NFT — whose buying or selling can materially move thin markets, especially long-tail assets.
A "whale" is anyone holding enough of an asset that their trades visibly move the market. The threshold is asset-dependent: a 1,000-BTC wallet is a whale; a 10-million-MEME-coin wallet might be too if the market cap is small.
Whale watching — tracking large wallets via on-chain analytics — is a sub-industry of crypto. Lookonchain, Arkham, Nansen, and similar platforms publish whale alerts. The smaller counterparts — "shrimps" or "minnows" — refer to retail holders.