How to track whale wallets on ripr

A whale wallet is one of the few wallets that holds enough of a coin to move its price when it trades. On ripr you track one in four steps: read the coin's holder concentration, watch the large trades arrive in its live trade list, open the wallet as a ripr profile, then follow it and keep its coins in a watchlist. This is how to track whale wallets without mistaking one big buy for a reason to trade.

What is a whale wallet?

A whale wallet is a Solana address that holds a large share of one coin's supply — large enough that when it buys or sells, the price notices. The measure that matters is share of supply, not dollars: $20,000 is a rounding error in a deep market and a controlling position in a coin that launched this morning.

Concentration is the normal state of a small coin. On one active Solana coin, ripr's market data showed the top 10 wallets holding about 61% of the supply held in wallets and the top 50 holding about 85%, with fewer than five wallets holding more than $10,000 of it. Ten wallets, in effect, decide what that market does.

A wallet address is the public identifier of a Solana account: a long string of letters and numbers anyone can look up. Every trade a whale makes is already public, so tracking one needs no permission. The work is knowing which numbers to read.

How to track whale wallets on ripr: start with holder concentration

On ripr, tracking whale wallets starts on the coin's own page, which shows how much of the supply the top 10 and top 50 holders and the creator hold, leaving out pools and vaults. A pool is the shared liquidity a coin trades against rather than a person's position, so leaving it out keeps the figure about holders.

Read the three numbers together:

1. Top 10 share — how few wallets it would take to flood the market.
2. Top 50 share — whether the supply is spread across a wider group, or sitting with the same ten.
3. The creator's share — whether the biggest whale is the person who made the coin.

If the top 10 hold most of the supply and the top 50 barely adds to it, that is one small group; a top 10 well below the top 50 means the supply is spread wider. Compare the three numbers across a few coins of similar age and size before you decide what counts as heavy. The app also lists the other coins a coin's creator has launched, so a large creator position can be read next to their record.

Concentration matters for your own order too. Larger trades can move the quoted price more than small ones, especially in active or thin markets, which is why the help centre page on how buy and sell size affect price suggests a small test order and a look at the quote impact before you confirm. The whale you are tracking sells into the same thin market you buy in.

Watch the big trades land in ripr's live trade list

ripr's coin page shows recent trades with live updates, so a whale-sized order appears while it is happening rather than in a report hours later. Prices, charts and trade data in ripr's web, iOS and Android apps all arrive over a live streaming connection.

Watch for the difference between one order and a crowd. A single unusually large buy in an otherwise quiet feed is one wallet taking a position; a run of mid-sized buys from many wallets is demand. Both can draw the same green candle and look nothing alike in the list of trades. On iOS and Android the chart also draws your entry line and your own trade markers, so once you hold the coin you can see where you stand against that flow.

Read the wallet as a ripr profile

Every ripr account is a Solana wallet, so a trader's profile is the wallet: it shows holdings and trading results taken from ripr's index of that wallet's on-chain activity. That is what turns a big name into something you can check.

On iOS and Android, profiles and your own Portfolio show realized and open profit and loss over the last 7 or 30 days, computed from indexed trades. Realized is money already taken off the table; open is paper value that can still go the other way. A whale sitting on a large open gain in a single coin has not proved an exit yet.

Profiles can earn badges such as OG, Verified Creator and Streamer, and ripr pairs trading with a social feed and public profiles, so you can follow a trader and read what they say about a coin before their next trade.

The iOS and Android apps also let you browse top traders ranked by profit, return, volume or win rate over 1, 7 or 30 days — a quick way to find wallets worth tracking at all. If you arrive with an address from somewhere else, the Solana explorer holds its raw transaction record.

Follow the wallet and keep its coins on a watchlist

Tracking only pays off when you see the same wallet again, so keep both on ripr: follow the trader, and put the coins they turn up in on a watchlist. Watchlists live in Explore, next to its trending, new and upcoming coin lists and a screener that sorts and filters the rest of the market.

ripr's notifications cover dozens of event types, from replies and follows to price and launch alerts, capped at 8 push notifications an hour and 25 a day — enough to hear about the coins you are watching without a phone full of pings.

Then give it a rhythm:

1. Keep two or three wallets you are actually tracking. More than that and none of them get read.
2. When one turns up in a coin you already like, add the coin to a watchlist and give yourself a day before acting.
3. Check the holder shares again before you buy. They move as the whale trades, which is the point of watching.

What a whale's buy does not tell you

A large position is a fact about one wallet, not a verdict on the coin — and the whale may be the coin's own creator, or several wallets working together. ripr checks coins, including newly created ones, for coordinated-launch patterns, linked wallets and creators keeping supply, and shows anything it finds as a warning on the coin. The app says plainly that not seeing a warning never means a coin is safe.

Before you follow a whale into anything:

1. Paste the full contract address into ripr's search. Any Solana coin can be found by name, ticker or full contract address, and the address is the one identifier a copycat cannot imitate.
2. Read the warnings on the coin page alongside the holder numbers.
3. Size the position so a total loss is survivable; our post on how much to invest in meme coins covers how to pick that number.
4. Decide your exit before you enter, not while the whale is selling.

The help centre is blunt about the social side of this in how can I trade more safely: avoid copying random trade calls from social media, and confirm the details on the coin page yourself before placing orders. A whale's buy is a trade call nobody gave you. Our guide to spotting a risky meme coin walks through the rest of the checks.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to the price when a whale sells?

A large sell can move the quoted price far more than a small one, and the thinner a coin's liquidity, the further it moves. That is why one whale exit can mark a coin down hard. ripr's help centre suggests the same defence for your own orders: a small test trade first, a look at the quote impact before confirming, and big trades broken into steps.

Is tracking whale wallets the same as copy trading?

No. Tracking a whale wallet means using its activity as a research lead, while the decision and the order stay yours. On ripr, the execution layer prepares each trade on its server, the app checks it on your device against the amount and slippage you chose, and your own wallet signs it.

Where can I see every transaction a whale wallet has made?

A ripr profile shows that wallet's holdings and trading results, taken from ripr's index of its on-chain activity, which is what you need to judge a trader. For the complete raw record of a Solana address, open it on the Solana explorer — every Solana wallet's transactions are public.

How much holder concentration is too much?

There is no single line. On ripr, read the top 10, top 50 and creator shares together and compare them across a few coins of the same age and size. The fewer wallets that hold most of the supply, the fewer trades it takes to move the price.

Start with one coin

Whale tracking is a reading habit rather than a signal service. Open a coin on ripr, read the top 10, top 50 and creator shares, watch the live trade list for one session, and note the two wallets you keep seeing. Then put them through your own checks, and let the coin page, not the whale, have the last word.

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Last verified 3 November 2026. This article is published by ripr, which builds an app for trading Solana coins. Nothing here is financial advice.