Social trading is a popular investment strategy in traditional finance that involves following the investment strategies of others or professional traders by replicating or mirroring their trading actions. This strategy provides a simple and convenient way for people who lack relevant knowledge or don’t have time to extensively research the financial markets. However, in the NFT market, successful investments require more expertise and understanding, despite the possibility of following well-known NFT investors or professionals on social media.

The “whale watching” trading strategy involves observing the trading actions of influential participants in the market, known as “whales,” and imitating or following their actions to gain investment opportunities and increase returns quickly. The transparent and open nature of blockchain technology allows for publicly visible transaction records, enabling the observation and imitation of whale operations. By following the trading actions of whales, investors can attempt to benefit from their expertise, experience, and market insights.

This article introduces how to use the NFTScan NFT API to track whale wallet addresses. NFTs are increasingly being applied in various fields as digital assets, and whale traders often hold significant influence. The NFTScan NFT API provides several API interfaces to help developers and users track whale wallet addresses and understand the activities of whales in the NFT market.

I. What are NFT Whales?

NFT whales refer to individuals or entities with substantial funds and influence in the NFT market. They are typically investors or collectors who are interested in NFT projects and invest significant amounts of money. Due to the relatively new and rapidly evolving nature of the NFT market, these whale investors play important roles and their actions and decisions often have a significant impact on the market.

NFT whales shape the supply and demand dynamics of the market and influence the price trends of NFTs by purchasing, holding, and trading a large number of NFTs. Their investment decisions may attract attention and imitation from other investors because whale trading behavior is considered to have market insights and expertise. The actions and strategies of whales in the NFT market are often widely followed. They may choose to invest in unique, rare, or potentially valuable NFT artworks or participate in early sales and auctions of NFT projects. By demonstrating strong purchasing power and an impressive NFT portfolio in the market, whales can also shape market reputation and influence.

II. Tracking Whales with NFTScan NFT API

1/ Register an NFTScan developer account

Before using the NFTScan API, you need to visit the developer website and create an account.

Go to the NFTScan official website: https://developer.nftscan.com/user/signup

Click the “Sign Up” button for the NFTScan API.

After logging in, find your unique API Key on the dashboard and copy it. Visit the API documentation and enter your API Key in the appropriate location. Follow the instructions in the documentation to start using the API service. In the API documentation, developers can find various interface modes to choose from according to their needs. In the dashboard, developers can also view statistical data on their API usage, which helps keep track of historical usage data. Furthermore, NFTScan provides a daily quota of 10,000 free API calls for each registered developer.

2/ Access the API documentation:

After successfully registering and obtaining your API Key, you need to access the NFTScan API documentation. The API documentation contains all available API endpoints, parameters, and detailed information on how to construct requests and handle responses. Read the API documentation carefully and make sure you understand how to use the API to retrieve the data you need. The NFTScan API service aims to improve the data analysis experience for developers seeking NFT data.

Due to the lack of strict adherence to standardized underlying smart contract codes in various NFT projects in the market, and the different ways in which projects store metadata, a single querying product cannot be compatible with all NFT products. NFTScan addresses this issue by standardizing and presenting the data clearly to users.

NFTScan currently possesses the largest and most comprehensive NFT Collection library across the entire network. It has supported full data for 14 blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, BNBChain, Bitcoin, Polygon, Aptos, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, Moonbeam, PlatON, Cronos, and Gnosis. The covered NFT data is extensive and diverse, providing a complete set of interfaces to obtain information such as ERC721 and ERC1155 assets, transactions, projects, market statistics, and more. It now supports over 40 public interfaces for EVM-compatible chains, as well as a batch of similar model interfaces for Solana, Aptos, and Bitcoin, which greatly satisfies the needs of developers to index various types of NFT data.

3/ How to Track Whale Wallet Addresses

a. “Account Overview Statistics”

User NFT Overview Interface As of May 25th, according to NFTScan’s mainstream chain data, there have been 2,044,973 cumulative NFT contract deployments, issuing 815,703,000 NFT assets, with 2,033,062,719 NFT on-chain records, and 113,286,134 NFT holding wallet addresses. With such a vast number, how can we find the NFT asset overview held by the whale address we want to query in the sea of data? This can be achieved quickly by using one of the NFTScan NFT API interfaces called “Account Overview Statistics.”

NFTScan | NFT API

Here, we are requesting the NFT overview held by the whale address: (wilcox.eth) 0xa25803ab86a327786bb59395fc0164d826b98298

The interface returns the following 15 data points for this address’s NFT overview:

b. “Get NFT by Account”

Get NFT by Account Interface Tracking the NFTs held by a whale address is crucial for identifying market trends and opportunities. Assets held by whales often have higher market potential and can reflect market directions and opportunities. Other investors can use this information to identify the next investment hotspots. Assessing the development prospects of a project often involves monitoring assets that are concentrated in the hands of a few whale addresses. By observing whether these whales are accumulating or reducing assets of a particular project, one can evaluate the project’s development prospects and sustainability.

NFTScan | NFT API

To query and track NFTs owned by a whale address using the NFT API:

/v2/account/own/{account_address}

This interface returns the NFT data held by a user’s address. The query parameters include the Type (erc-721/erc-1155), contract_address, cursor, limit, show_attribute, sort_field (sorting fields including mint_time/own_time/latest_trade_price, mint_time and own_time sorting only apply to erc721 NFTs), and sort_direction.

c. Querying the API interface for user transactions

In addition to querying the NFTs owned by a monitored whale address, observing the transaction activity of the whale address is also an important aspect of tracking NFT whales. By observing their transactions, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the whale’s behavior and strategies in the NFT market. The API interface for querying user transactions through NFTScan (/v2/transactions/account/{account_address}) will return the user’s NFT transaction records sorted in descending order of timestamps. It returns transaction records related to the address, including transaction type, transaction time, counterparty, NFT contract, transaction amount, and other information.

The query parameters include contract_address (NFT asset contract address), token_id (NFT’s tokenId, supports hexadecimal or decimal), event_type (NFT event type: Mint/Transfer/Sale/Burn), cursor (retrieve the next page cursor), limit (page size), and sort_direction.

In addition to the above interfaces, NFTScan also provides interfaces such as user-owned NFT distribution (/v2/statistics/distribution/{account_address}) and querying the number of NFTs owned by a user (/v2/asset/account/amount) to help developers or users track NFT whale address activities.

The NFT API provided by NFTScan provides crucial support for developers to obtain comprehensive NFT data. Developers can use NFTScan’s API flexibly to build various applications and solutions according to their business needs. Additionally, developers can use NFTScan’s data and API to develop customized solutions, providing data support and insights for institutional investors or project owners. Therefore, NFTScan is an important channel for developers to access comprehensive NFT market data.

About NFTScan

NFTScan is the world’s largest NFT data infrastructure, including a professional NFT explorer and NFT developer platform, supporting the complete amount of NFT data for 14 blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, BNBChain, Arbitrum, Optimism, and other major networks, providing NFT API for developers on various blockchains.

Official Links:

NFTScan: https://nftscan.com/

Developer: https://developer.nftscan.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nftscan_com

Discord: https://discord.gg/nftscan