# Bitcoin Whale Alerts Coincide With More Same-Direction Wallet Activity

By Enna Lee

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/investing/26796
Published: 2026-10-05T11:44:14.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-05T11:44:14.000Z
Section: Investing

> The largest short-term shifts appeared among medium-sized wallets. The analysis does not show that alerts caused trading or that following large wallets was profitable.

Bitcoin (BTC) wallet activity shifted toward the direction of large transactions in the 15 minutes after public whale alerts, with the strongest changes among medium-sized wallets in a preliminary analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

After alerts for large Bitcoin buys, the share of medium-sized wallets active in buying rose 23.72 percentage points compared with the preceding 15-minute window. The increase was 14.81 points among small wallets and 3.50 points among large wallets.

Following large-sell alerts, sell participation rose 29.52 percentage points among medium-sized wallets, 12.95 points among small wallets and 2.95 points among large wallets. These figures measure changes in the share of wallets active in the indicated direction; they are not estimates of individual traders’ likelihood of acting or of investment returns.

The analysis used Whale Alert notifications from Dec. 14, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2025. It examined 5,884 Bitcoin events: 3,471 buys and 2,413 sells. Events were excluded if another whale transaction occurred within 120 minutes before or after.

A whale was defined as a wallet that made at least one transfer worth more than $50 million during the sample period. Exchange and smart-contract wallets were excluded from the wallet-size groups. Other wallets were sorted by transaction-size percentiles within six-month periods. Because the analysis relies on on-chain data, wallets cannot be reliably linked to individual investors; one person may use multiple wallets.

Ethereum showed no broad immediate directional response. The results describe a connection between alert timing and wallet activity, but do not establish that traders saw the alerts and acted because of them, or that trading in the same direction as large wallets was profitable. The research is preliminary and was circulated for discussion.