Investor Insights: Whale Watching

Investor Insights: Whale Watching:

The Milk Man’s been wondering how big money has been navigating this downturn. With the assistance of real-time blockchain data, he’s serving up insights for three wallets this week:

1. The wallet managing 1inch’s investment fund
2. The wallet of a top ranked whale on DeBank
3. The Dogecoin wallet of Robinhood

Note: This article uses on-chain data to analyze the token holdings of different entities. All associations of real-life entities with blockchain addresses are our “best guesses” and could, from time to time, be incorrect. Portfolio snapshots presented in this article solely relate to tokens held on Ethereum or Ethereum-compatible networks and do not include holdings on other chains (e.g., Bitcoin, Solana, etc.). 

1Inch’s Team Investment Fund: $81.5M in total assets

What is 1Inch?

First off, 1Inch is one of the most popular DEX aggregators. DEX aggregators use algorithms to compare prices from decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and Sushiswap, with the goal of locking in the cheapest trade route for the user.

We focused on this wallet because 1Inch is led by two very experienced founders:

1. Anton Bukov: Anton grew up as a gamer and began coding at age 12. He got into blockchain in 2014 after developing an arbitrage bot for a financial exchange. He really made the dive into the industry in 2017, participating in a hackathon alongside no other than Vitilik himself. Safe to say he knows a thing or two when it comes to crypto.

2. Sergej Kunz: Sergej is a seasoned software engineer, building his first computer from scratch at age 13 and learning about coding at the library due to his lack of internet connection. And he’s been mining BTC since 2012…

And we can verify they run this wallet but looking at the contract creation on Etherscan. This leads us back to the ENS name and wallet address of Anton (k06a.eth).

Their portfolio is positioned fairly conservatively at this time:

• ETH accounts for ~34% of their holdings
• Stablecoins USDT and USDC each account for ~30% of holdings bringing their total stablecoin allocation to ~60%.
• The remainder of the portfolio consists of 1Inch (1INCH) and Uniswap (UNI) governance tokens which account for ~5% and ~2% of total holdings, respectively. 

~60% of the fund’s holdings are sitting in stablecoins. Interestingly, their stablecoin holdings are split down the middle between USDT and USDC.

Their other major holding is ETH, making up ~33% of their portfolio – almost all of which is used to provide liquidity on Uniswap and earn trading fees:

And when you account for tokens that are staked or in a liquidity pool, you can see that they are earning yield on ~42% of their holdings.

DeBank Whale: ABCD – $18.7M in assets

Here’s some context on this whale:

• Although they have bridged funds around in the past, their entire focus is currently on the Ethereum ecosystem
• They are putting their money to work with 99% of their portfolio being staked or lent to earn interest
• They hold the #34 ranking on Debank’s social ranking, which is a combination of net worth and followers on the platform

The two protocols this whale is very active in are Lido and Aave.

Lido is the leading liquid staking derivative (LSD) in the market, holding almost 75% of the market share with $14B locked on their platform. LSD’s offer up a way for investors to stake their ETH without meeting the minimum validator requirement of holding 32 Ether. They pool users ETH and allow them to earn staking rewards, while taking a cut off the top. In Lido’s case, they issue users stETH when they deposit their tokens into the platform as an interest-bearing receipt. And since you receive a tokenized receipt, new ways are emerging of earning additional yield on your staked holdings.

While this whale has ~$7M staked in Lido’s platform, they are taking things even further and are clearly very bullish on Ether. They are utilizing Aave, the leading lending protocol, to gain even more exposure to stETH.

But they aren’t taking on a lot of risk to do so. While they are borrowing ~$10M in assets, they have ~$20M supplied on Aave to counter that. And with a health rate of 1.69, their risk of liquidation is extremely low. For reference, you can only be liquidated on Aave if your health rate is below 1.

Their stETH position in Aave is greater than the overall net worth of the wallet. This is possible because they are borrowing ~$10M of Bitcoin incrementally and selling it on Binance.

Why do this? This wallet feels that their Ether + staking rewards are going to outperform Bitcoin. They want as much exposure to ETH as possible.

At least they did… on June 21st they withdrew ~$4.5M of their ETH from Aave and deposited it into Binance.

While we don’t have visibility into Binance’s exchange and are unsure of the reason, the timing lines up with a list of bullish announcements around Bitcoin and potential spot ETFs. Announcements that have brought Bitcoin’s dominance of the total crypto market to the highest level in over 2 years.

Robinhood’s Dogecoin Wallet – $2.5B+

Robinhood exploded in popularity because they gamify investing and allow anyone to get started with a mobile phone and a few bucks. This formula has made Robinhood and DOGE a match made in heaven.

That’s why it’s no surprise that Robinhood is holding over 38M DOGE worth $2.5B on behalf of its users. That’s 27.4% of the total supply of the token.

This figure sticks out even more when you compare it to their user’s holdings in ETH and BTC. As of March 31st, DOGE made up over 26% of Robinhood’s total crypto holdings.