NEAR - 12. The Whales of NEAR

Where in the ocean of NEAR do the whales hang out? Examine the top 20 addresses by amount of NEAR held - excluding any custodial or exchange addresses that you can. Can you identify any “power players” or wallets of interest? What behaviors do these whales exhibit?

Overview

Top 20 Whales of NEAR are defined as the Top 20 wallets with the most NEAR balance.
This balance is calculated looking at all the transfers, swaps, staking transactions.

All wallets that are either custodial or exchange addresses are ignored

WHERE WALLET NOT IN (select address from near.core.dim_address_labels where l2_label in ('hot_wallet', 'fee_wallet', 'cold_wallet'))
  AND WALLET NOT ILIKE 'binance%' AND WALLET NOT ILIKE '%pool%.near' AND WALLET NOT ILIKE 'nfendowment%' AND WALLET NOT ILIKE '%lockup.near'
  AND WALLET NOT ILIKE 'nfeco%.near' AND WALLET NOT ILIKE 'nv2-nearx.stader-labs.near' AND WALLET NOT ILIKE '%.stader-labs.near'
  AND WALLET NOT IN ('linear-protocol.near', 'proximity-prime.near','bscdeposit.near','stader-nearx.sputnik-dao.near','kucoinc.near','marketplace.paras.near',
  'e-near.near','app.nearcrowd.near','bitkubhwallet.near','linear.sputnik-dao.near','token.sweat')

Credits to for the base query.

Balance Distribution

Before we look at the whales lets take a look at the balance distribution for all wallets with > 0.1 $NEAR of balance.
A lot of wallets have balance < 0.1 $NEAR, but we ignore those wallets purposely.
Most of the wallets have balance between 0.1 and 0.5 NEAR.
Only 1.6K wallets have balances > 100K $NEAR, this is where the whales come from.
Overall the balance distribution is quite even with the number of wallets decreasing for higher balances.

What behaviors do these whales exhibit?

Behaviors that we look for are the following:
- INFLOW of NEAR into wallet
- OUTFLOW of NEAR from wallet
- SWAP TO NEAR
- SWAP FROM NEAR
- UNSTAKE
- STAKE
However out of all these transactions, these whales wallets are mostly focused on outflow transaction of NEAR tokens from wallets
Surprisingly the $NEAR Volume of inflow is more for these whales than the outflow.

Top 20 $NEAR Holders

2cb04b0ca42cae381caf2baf80ed93ecd361d0c7e90ef6821c42e70c08276ed1 is the top holder of $NEAR with 28M $NEAR.
Followed by a778de7fc42034af1c85cac901fd40392dfc1cc69c3a688ea149112f57b0063e with 21M $NEAR tokens.

Can you identify any “power players” or wallets of interest?

5c33c6218d47e00ef229f60da78d0897e1ee9665312550b8afd5f9c7bc6957d2 is a particular power player which has been very active since June 2022 and even though it doesn’t have the highest balance but it still has an insane amount of transactions, so many infact even the NEAR explorer doesn’t load its transactions.
The Balance of this account has clearly decreased from 6M to 2M $NEAR as of today.
Seems like this is one of the wallets that received exploiter 10K NEAR tokens *