What are whales buying in crypto? How to read smart money flows on ripr

What are whales buying in crypto? There is no published list of whale buys, so the real answer is that you read it off the market yourself. On ripr that takes about ten minutes: sort Explore for the coins taking the heaviest buying right now, then open one and check how the trades are landing and who already holds it.

What are whales buying in crypto right now?

No feed anywhere shows whale buys as they happen, so on ripr you read them off the trades themselves: a whale is any wallet big enough that its own order moves a coin's price. In Solana meme coins that bar sits lower than most people expect. When a coin's pool holds a few hundred thousand dollars, a $20,000 order is a whale-sized trade; the same order barely registers in a pool a hundred times deeper.

Big buyers don't announce themselves, but they leave a footprint: how many wallets are buying, how much money goes in against how much comes out, and how the holder list looks afterwards. ripr shows all three from an in-house Solana data layer it runs itself, which decodes each trade and puts the new fill on the chart as it lands.

So the question turns practical. Where is the buying, how big is it, and does it look organic?

Sort Explore on ripr to find where the buying is

Start on ripr's Explore screen and screener, which lists trending, newly launched and upcoming coins and keeps your watchlists. The Trending tab is the quickest read on fresh demand: it ranks coins on how fast trades, volume and distinct buyers are growing, and it lowers coins whose activity looks manipulated. Distinct buyers matter more than raw trade count, because one wallet can print a hundred trades by itself.

Then narrow the field with the screener. Its sorts include Volume 24h, Txns 24h, Holders and Gainers 24h, and its range filters cover market cap, liquidity, age and the number of Buys 24h and Sells 24h.

A filter set worth re-using:

1. Set a market-cap band you care about, say $200,000 to $5 million, so one large order is still visible in the price.
2. Set a liquidity floor, because you need a market to sell back into.
3. Sort by Volume 24h, then switch to Txns 24h and compare the two lists.
4. Raise the Buys 24h minimum to drop coins where almost nothing is happening.

One useful detail: when you sort by market cap and leave those bounds unset, the screener hides coins under $5,000 of liquidity or 100 holders, so the top of that sort stays tradeable.

Coins that show up on both the volume list and the trade-count list are where money and attention overlap. That is your shortlist, not your shopping list.

Compare buy and sell size, not the number of buys

On a ripr coin page, compare the money bought against the money sold rather than the number of buys and sells. Counts tell you how many wallets traded; volume tells you how much money did, and money is what whales move. The two readings often disagree.

Here is that gap in ripr's own market data. On one active Solana coin, a 24-hour window held about 2,500 buys against 1,600 sells, a clear majority of trades, yet roughly $710,000 of buying against $990,000 of selling: lots of small wallets bought, and bigger ones sold into them. A second coin ran the other way, with about 24,900 buys to 31,600 sells but about $1.68 million bought against $1.66 million sold.

You read that split off the coin page. The recent-trades list updates live as fills land, so a handful of large buys looks nothing like a stream of $20 ones. On desktop web, the chart also has a volume view across eight timeframes in USD, SOL or INR, which makes a sudden block of buying easy to spot, and the iOS and Android charts mark trades on the price line itself.

Size is the whole point here, because larger trades move the quoted price more than small ones in a thin market.

Read the holders: who already owns the coin

Every ripr coin page shows who already owns the coin: how much of the supply the top 10 and top 50 holders and the creator hold, with pools and vaults left out, next to the holder count. Read it to see whether the buying is spreading across new wallets or concentrating into a few.

Two patterns are worth learning:

• Holder count climbing while the top-10 share stays flat or falls: new wallets are arriving, and no single buyer dominates the coin.
• Top-10 share climbing on a flat holder count: the same few wallets are adding. That may be one whale building a position, and it is also what a coordinated group looks like.

The wallets themselves are readable too. Every account is a Solana wallet, and profiles show holdings and trading results taken from the app's index of that wallet's on-chain activity. If you would rather start from people than from coins, the iOS and Android apps list top traders by profit, return, volume or win rate over 1, 7 or 30 days. For the raw record of any wallet, Solana's block explorer holds every transaction it has signed.

Check the warnings before you follow the money in

Read ripr's warnings on a coin before you treat heavy buying as a signal, because volume on a day-old coin is the easiest thing on Solana to manufacture. Before you buy, ripr shows warnings for known rug patterns such as a creator who holds unlocked liquidity, liquidity that has already been pulled, or a coordinated launch, and it says plainly that the absence of a warning does not mean a coin is fine.

Those checks run on new launches too, looking for coordinated-launch patterns, linked wallets and creators keeping supply, and whatever they turn up shows on the coin. On iOS and Android, ripr's coin pages also tell you when a coin is under review, has low liquidity, has paused prices or is still being checked. The coin page lists the other coins a creator has launched, so you can see what else the same person shipped.

When the flow and the warnings disagree, believe the warnings. Our guide to spotting a risky meme coin before you buy covers the rest of those checks.

Your ten-minute routine on ripr

Run the whole read on ripr as one loop you repeat, rather than a one-off. Start to finish:

1. Open Explore, scan Trending, then sort the screener by Volume 24h inside your market-cap band.
2. Open the top three or four coins and compare buy money against sell money, not trade counts.
3. Check the top-10 and top-50 shares against the holder count, then read the coin's warnings.
4. Add the survivors to a watchlist instead of buying straight away, and let ripr's price alerts tell you when one moves.
5. If you do buy, start small. ripr's Auto slippage sets your maximum from the coin's last five minutes of price movement, and the app checks the prepared transaction on your device against the amount, slippage and fee limits you set before your wallet signs.

Heard a ticker somewhere else? Paste the full contract address into ripr's search, which also takes a name or a ticker. On iOS and Android you can follow a narrative and get a notification when it turns Hot, which asks the same question at theme level. Afterwards, your portfolio in those apps shows profit and loss over 7 or 30 days, so you can tell whether following the flow actually paid.

Frequently asked questions

Can you see which wallets are buying a coin on ripr?

Each ripr coin page lists recent trades as they land and shows the share of supply held by the top 10 and top 50 holders and by the creator, with pools and vaults left out. Profiles are Solana wallets as well, so you can open a profile and read its holdings and trading results.

Does more buys than sells mean the price will go up?

No. Buy and sell counts say how many trades happened, not how much money moved, so a coin can take more buys than sells while far more dollars leave than arrive. Compare buy volume against sell volume over the same window before you call it accumulation.

What counts as a whale in Solana meme coins?

There is no fixed figure. A whale is any wallet whose order is large next to the coin's liquidity, so a $10,000 buy can dominate a small pool and barely register in a deep one. Check the coin's liquidity on ripr first, then judge trade sizes against it.

Is copying whale buys a good strategy?

Copying a buy means taking someone's entry without their exit plan, and large wallets often sell into the attention their own buying creates. ripr's help centre on trading more safely suggests checking the coin page yourself and placing a small test trade first.

Start with one coin, not ten

Pick a market-cap band tonight, sort ripr's Explore screener by Volume 24h, and take one coin all the way through: buy money against sell money, then holders, then warnings. If you want the longer view on what to do with a coin once you own it, read our Solana meme coin trading strategy guide next.

---

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