Introduction

Methodology

Whale definition

I will define a whale as an address in the top 1000 addresses by highest balance. From the total 11.9M addresses holding a total balance of 9.99B, the whales hold 9.37B, so <1% hold over 93.7% of ALGO. Not a very distributed asset.

The whale can also be defined with the balance of the smallest whale, being that 267k ALGO.

Swaps

Three different queries were created to answer the questions. Each ones is based on a CTE querying the algorand.account table with constraints account_closed = 'FALSE' and balance >266880 and then using this list of addresses as a contraint in a follow up CTE.

Swaps per whale

A count (distinct tx_group_id) aggregating by swapper is selected, with time constraint since January 1st 2022.

Swapped asset from/to

Two queries, one for asset swapped from and other for asset swapped to, were made to count (distinct tx_group_id) aggregating by asset_id. The asset_name was obtained joining with the algorand.asset and ALGO was identified as asset_id = 0 by means of a case. Time constrain as above was used.

Results

Swaps per whale

Figure 1. shows the number of swaps per whale. A total of 12 addresses from the 1000 whales are swapping, so merely 1,2% of whales swap. From them, 6 have only swapped 3 times or less while the other 6 have made between 7 and 80 swaps since January 1st, 2022.

Swapped asset from/to

Figures 2. and 3. show the swapped from and to asset over time respectively.

Only 9 assets were swapped from by whales, with some tokens known to non-whale swappers as well, (see Popular Algorand Assets To Swap On DEXes). There are some tokens which are swapped regularly over time, like ALGO throughout the analysed period or AKITA INU between late January and end of February and others like Opulous which is only swapped one day.

There are 19 assets swapped to by whales. There are some singlely swapped assets like Taco Coin, Smile Coin, Buy Token or STBL and others which see multiple swaps either concentrated like USDC on February 13th or GARD on April 12th or distributed like ALGO throughout the analysed period or Opulous between January 26th and 28th.

Conclusion

Whales are not commited to swaps, probably because I think most of these addresses are "institutional" holders like CEX or they don't use their main address to interact directly. Then, thez can protect their privacy from people like these pesky bounty hunters. From the whales that swap, 50% are practically one-time swappers while the 50% remaining see a bigge volume, specially the Top 1 with over 80.