Why size is the wrong threshold
The usual whale alert fires above a dollar amount. On a venue where opening an address takes a minute and where plenty of markets are thin, that threshold catches two very different things: a wallet with a history of moving price, and somebody pushing a large notional through a book that could not absorb it. Both look identical in a size-filtered feed.
The distinction is measurable. A wallet that has repeatedly traded ahead of a move leaves a record; a wallet appearing for the first time does not. Ranking on measured impact rather than notional is what keeps the feed short enough to read.
注 A short feed is the point. An alert stream you stop opening is worth less than no alert stream, because it costs attention and returns nothing.
What arrives with each alert
- The wallet’s history — whether this address has moved price before, and on what kind of market.
- The book it traded into — depth on both sides, so a large fill in a thin market reads as what it is. See reading an order book.
- The surrounding structure — funding, open interest and long/short positioning across venues, so a prediction-market move can be placed against the crypto market it depends on.
- Liquidations — because a cascade explains a lot of moves that otherwise look like conviction.
Alerts reach the dashboard, Telegram and webhooks. The alert setup guide covers the thresholds and how to keep the volume usable.
What it will not do
It will not tell you a whale is right. A wallet that has moved price before can still be wrong on this trade, and the tracker makes no claim about the outcome — it reports who acted and into what conditions.
It will not size a position for you. Copying a large wallet without the balance sheet that lets it sit through a drawdown is the most common way a small account gets hurt on this venue; there is a write-up of exactly that.
Frequently asked
- What counts as a whale on Polymarket?
- Here, a wallet whose trades have measurably preceded price moves, repeatedly. Not a dollar threshold — the same amount means something different in a deep market and in a thin one.
- How fast are the alerts?
- They are sent as trades settle on chain. We do not publish a latency figure, because we have not measured one we would be willing to defend across every market condition.
- Can I track a specific wallet?
- Yes — a watchlist follows named addresses regardless of whether they clear the ranking threshold. The getting-started guide covers it.
- Is whale tracking enough on its own?
- Rarely. It tells you where size went, not why or whether it was right. It is most useful read against the book and the positioning it happened in — which is why those arrive with it rather than in another tab.
Keep reading
- How to track Polymarket whales
The method, step by step, including without a paid tool.
- Best Polymarket analytics tools
How the trackers on this venue compare.