Shiba Inu Leads Whale Frenzy: Large SHIB Transfers See Massive 360% Spike

On-chain data shows Shiba Inu is among the altcoins that have enjoyed a sharp uptick in interest from the whales over the past week.

In a new post on X, the on-chain analytics firm Santiment has discussed about the trend in the Whale Transaction Count for various top altcoins. The “Whale Transaction Count” here refers to an indicator that keeps track of the total amount of transfers happening on a given network that are carrying a value of at least $100,000.

Transactions of this scale are typically associated with the whale entities, so this indicator’s value tells us about what the activity from these large investors is like at the moment. When the value of this metric is high, it means the network is handling a high number of large transactions right now. Such a trend implies the whales have an active interest in trading the coin.

On the other hand, the indicator being low implies the whales may not be paying much attention to the cryptocurrency as they are not making too many transfers.

Now, here is a table that shows the ranking of the digital assets with at least a $2 billion market cap based on the latest weekly change in their Whale Transaction Count:

As is visible above, Injective (INJ), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) on the Optimism blockchain, and Shiba Inu (SHIB) have been the top three coins in terms of this metric over the past week. Compared to one week ago, the indicator is up 455% for INJ, 420% for WBTC, and 360% for SHIB. These values are all clearly very significant, suggesting that the whales have shown a huge burst of activity on these networks.

The rest of the coins on this list have also enjoyed a notable increase in whale activity during this window, but there is a large gap between them and the top three. While Shiba Inu isn’t number one, its surge in the Whale Transaction Count may still be the most impressive, considering that a coin like Injective is much smaller in market cap. Large coins generally already have significant whale activity, so room for percentage growth tends to be relatively small, which may be why some of the popular names are absent from the list.

The other two major memecoins, Dogecoin (DOGE) and Pepe (PEPE), are also present on this list, but Shiba Inu has left them in the dust as they have only witnessed Whale Transaction growths of 109% and 66%.

Generally, it’s hard to say anything about whether the indicator being high is bullish or bearish for an asset, since it only tells us about the total number of whale transfers and nothing about the split between buy and sell moves.

That said, the Whale Transaction Count being high does usually correspond to higher volatility. In Shiba Inu’s case, the coin’s price has surged recently, implying that the burst of whale activity may have been tending towards buying so far.

At the time of writing, Shiba Inu is trading around $0.0000180, up more than 23% over the past week.