NANSEN

Alex Svanevik, a Norwegian data scientist, co-founded Nansen in Singapore in 2019 with Lars Bakke Krogvig and Evgeny Medvedev. The question they kept asking was simple: who is actually moving this money?

Blockchain data is public. Every transaction, every address, every token flow is on the ledger.

But millions of wallet addresses with no labels attached is just noise. Nansen set out to tag them, labeling which addresses belonged to exchanges, funds, known whales and the smart money traders who consistently got in early.

What started as research became a product. They built tools to collect, label and analyze on-chain data at scale, and now claim more than 500 million labeled addresses.

When you could see that a wallet tagged Smart Money was quietly accumulating a token, that was worth paying for. DeFi summer in 2020 and the NFT boom of 2021 gave Nansen immediate product-market fit with professional crypto traders and researchers.

Nansen runs on subscriptions. Individual analysts and traders pay a monthly fee that rises with how much data they need.

Protocols, funds and exchanges pay enterprise rates for API access and team plans. Since late 2025 it also earns trading fees from its AI-powered trading feature.

The core asset is wallet labeling, a proprietary database of tagged addresses that turns raw blockchain data into intelligence. The data advantage compounds: the more addresses they label, the more useful the product, the more users subscribe.

The Nansen platform is the main product, a research dashboard showing wallet labels, token flows, exchange flows and smart money tracking across major blockchains. Token God Mode gives deep analytics on any single token: holder distribution, whale activity, concentration risk.

Alerts tell users when labeled wallets move. Nansen Query offers SQL-style access to the labeled data for technical users, and there is an API for funds and exchanges.

In September 2025 it launched an AI chatbot, and from December 2025 an AI agent that lets users trade on Solana and Base by typing what they want, through a built-in Nansen wallet with fees of about 0.25%.

Nansen grew through the quality of its data and the power of crypto Twitter. During DeFi summer 2020, analysts sharing Nansen charts of whale movements and smart money flows became standard in crypto research threads.

The platform's visuals — wallet activity heatmaps, token flow diagrams, exchange netflow charts — were both useful and shareable. Every screenshot that got posted on Twitter was free marketing.

The NFT boom of 2021 created a second wave. Nansen built specific NFT analytics tools — floor price tracking, rarity analysis, whale activity on specific collections — that became essential during a period when NFT prices moved fast and information asymmetry was massive.

Traders who knew which wallets were accumulating a collection before the price moved had a real edge.

The crypto bear market of 2022-2023 hit Nansen hard. Prices fell 70-90%, trading volumes collapsed, and customers who had subscribed during the bull market churned or downgraded.

In May 2023 Nansen laid off about 30% of its staff, with Svanevik saying the company had strayed into areas that were not core. The fundamental problem is that crypto analytics is cyclical: demand spikes in bull markets and shrinks in bear markets.

Its latest answer is to become a trading app itself, which brings trading fees but also puts it in competition with the exchanges and wallets it used to just analyze.

a16z led a $12 million Series A in mid-2021. Accel led the $75 million Series B in December 2021 at a $750 million valuation, with GIC, a16z and Tiger Global joining, right at the top of the crypto bull market.

The bet was that blockchain data analytics would become a Bloomberg-style subscription that professional traders cannot do without. Whether the business can hold that through crypto cycles is the open question.