WIKI

Whale

Whale

Put simply, a whale is an entity (individual, institution, or exchange wallet) that holds a massive percentage of a specific token’s circulating supply. While the definition of ‘massive’ varies by market cap, a common rule of thumb is anyone holding 1% to 10% or more of the total supply, or enough to be a significant proportion of the total liquid market cap.

Why Should You Care?

Whales create centralization risk. If a project is technically ‘safe’ (no mint functions, liquidity locked), it can still be subject to a rug pull if a whale decides to exit.

  • Price Manipulation: Whales can create ‘Buy Walls’ to fake demand or ‘Sell Walls’ to suppress price while they accumulate.
  • Slippage: If a whale sells in a pool with low liquidity, they trigger a cascade of price drops, often hitting stop-losses and causing a panic.
  • Governance Attacks: In DAO-based projects, a whale can outvote the entire community, turning ‘decentralized’ apps into their personal playground.

Pro Tip: Always check the Wallet Distribution. If the top 10 holders own more than 20% of a non-stablecoin token (excluding the burn address and exchange wallets), you are trading at the mercy of a few individuals.

How to Track Them

You don’t have to guess what whales are doing. Use tools like Whale Alert or DeBank to watch their wallet movements. If you see a whale moving 10M tokens toward an exchange, it’s usually time to put your helmet on.

The Whale Ecosystem: Risk vs. Reward

You can check for whales on blockchain explorers (like Etherscan or BSCScan). Search for the token you’re interested in, then the ‘Holders’ tab is your best friend. Here’s how to read the whale signals:

FeatureThe ‘Good’ WhaleThe ‘Bad’ Whale
ConcentrationSpread across many wallets or locked in a DAO (often indicated by a small sheet of paper next to the address name.Periodic, small sales or providing liquidity.
ActivityPeriodic, small sells or providing liquidity.Massive, sudden dumps into thin liquidity.
OriginEarly seed investor or protocol treasury.Stealth-launched dev wallet or influencer dump.

Whales can be great for a project, bringing vast amounts of capital, but that doesn’t mean you should instantly see them as a hero. As the popular saying goes, ‘with great power comes great responsibility, and sadly, that power isn’t always used for the greater good.

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Disclaimer: This is done with our best knowledge and effort, nothing can be known for certain – always DYOR and risk management. This is NOT financial advice. Use the information presented here to inform your own decisions. Referral links may be included on any outbound link.

  • What do the risk ratings mean?

Our mission here at RugDoc is to screen for hard rug code that results in 100% theft of ALL underlying funds for ALL participants.

This is the ONE part of the due diligence process that most people cannot simply do on their own as it costs thousands of dollars to hire a senior solidity developer to look over a farm for safety.

A project coin with terrible code can go up in price, and a project with good code and a good team can also go down in price.

Do NOT use our ratings to refer to your likelihood in making money if you invest in the project. They are ONLY in reference to code safety.

Everything else beyond code safety is YOUR responsibility to go do research on. We just make sure the casino you’re betting in won’t rob you before you even get to place a bet.

Our reviews for projects are organized into a few colors.

🟢 Least Risk
These projects are the least likely to hard or soft rug. Usually reserved for cornerstone projects of an ecosystem where it makes no financial sense for them to rug in any manner as they make more money just being legit.

🔵 Low Risk
These projects are usually established projects in an ecosystem that have a track record of success or have KYC’d to us or other authoritative sources in the real world. As a result, it is extremely unlikely for them to soft rug or hard rug their projects. The projects can still fail and the token price can go down, but usually more as a result of natural market forces.

⚪️ Some Risk
This is the default rating for projects with unknown teams but have code that is unlikely to have hard rug risk. Since the team is unknown and doesn’t have a track record of success, it’s entirely possible that they may try to soft rug by dumping tokens, abandoning the project, etc. Even a last minute contract swap to a malicious contract is possible. The only thing that is unlikely is a complete hard rug as long as you are 100% sure you deposit into the contract we review.

🟠 Medium Risk
Similar to Some Risk, but the underlying code itself is custom enough or complex enough that it warrants an elevated risk rating that needs deeper research. Make sure you read every point presented to make sure you’re comfortable with that before entering. Still unlikely to hard rug, but more chances of custom code behaving incorrectly and causing other issues.

🔴 High Risk
Project contains code or practices that are HIGHLY LIKELY to lead to catastrophic losses as they are right now. Make sure you read the description carefully as we will always warn what these issues are. If you see the words Hard Rug anywhere in the review, STAY FAR AWAY!

⚫️ Not Eligible
We reserve the right to not review exceedingly complex projects that would require tens of thousands of dollars of senior security analyst man hours. Typically these are projects that deal with leverage, lending, options, derivatives, and anything that is overly complex and which requires tons of peer reviews and audits from top audit companies.

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  • How can I request for an update to my review?

🟢 For owners who have made impactful changes and would like an update to their farm review:

1️⃣ Use #update at @RugDocChat with your description and proof of changes and it will be forwarded to our scanners.

2️⃣ This does not guarantee a change in your review.

3️⃣ Owners who have difficulty solving the issues can consider our Consultation Package - please contact @BaymaxCrypto on Telegram to discuss.