Bonnie Blockchain
You Think You’re Following Smart Money. You’re Not ｜Alex Svanevik｜EP55｜Bonnie Blockchain
14 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What insights does Alex Svanevik share about smart money in crypto?
It's Google, Apple. Who do you think makes the greatest products of the two? Data scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century. As I've grown older, I've kind of started giving more weight to intuition. Like when I was in data science, we were always trying to arrest people for using intuition. Like you have to use data. You have to be data informed, data driven.
But I think there's a lot of value in intuition as well. what have you observed about human behavior because people can't lie on chain oh yeah there's a lot most people lose money on meme coins and there's a few people that make a lot of money the ones that make the most money are actually the meme coin trading platforms
It's pretty hard, actually, to compete the market or to beat the smartest money. If you know you're being observed, maybe you can use that to your benefit. That's part of the game. Sometimes you see these sensationalist posts of like, hey, so-and-so went super long on this and whatever. But in reality, it might have been hedged. So you have to be a little bit careful.
Chapter 2: How do data and intuition play a role in decision-making?
This is me becoming a little bit like data scientist. The bull market has been over for retail for a long time, probably since January.
And people are just talking about it now.
You have to skate where the puck is going instead of just thinking this is what the world looks like today.
I want your opinion on Ethereum now.
You could imagine a world where like no one uses Ethereum, but...
We are in Dubai with one of the smartest guy in crypto, Alex from Nansen. How are you?
I'm doing great, Pony. How are you?
With that shirt, I can't really tell you're an all numbers guy.
I don't know if I'm an all numbers guy. You're not? Numbers guy.
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Chapter 3: What observations can be made about human behavior in the crypto market?
That's right. Yes, my background is actually in AI. I like to say that I was in AI before it was cool. And I worked as a management consultant for a few years. And then I was a data scientist and a data science manager for a while. And so, you know, maybe that ages me or dates me somewhat. But when I graduated...
Actually, there was a front page article, I think, in The Economist that said, data scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century. So I had to go into data science.
They were right. That was how long ago?
This was 2009, 2010. Yeah.
Oh, I have a question about data scientists. So I heard this argument that, you know, in the future, the truth is in numbers.
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Chapter 4: How has the bull market changed for retail investors?
Like we listen to AI and they give us the correct answer.
Yeah.
So that sort of replaced, I don't know if we're ready for this, religion.
Oh wow, that's deep.
And the truth of the world.
I mean, in some ways, as I've grown older, I've kind of started giving more weight to intuition. Like when I was in data science, we were always trying to kind of arrest people for using intuition. Like you have to use data, you have to be data informed, data driven. But I think there's a lot of value in intuition as well. And so I think the magic is to like combine the two.
So obviously the way I run the company, Nansen, is quite data informed, but there's also a lot of use of intuition as well and taste and judgment. When you think about building great products, for example, I think take two companies, Google, Apple. Who do you think makes the greatest products of the two?
Google.
Okay, interesting.
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Chapter 5: What is the future of Ethereum according to Alex Svanevik?
I think it's Apple. But Google products are also very good. But Google products are much more, I think, data-oriented in their product development. Lots of A-B testing. Let's change this a little bit. And if the results are statistically significant, we'll switch the button from green to blue or something like that. Whereas Apple is much more demo-driven. At least when Jobs was leading Apple.
very demo-driven, very dog-fooding-oriented, although I don't think they like the term dog-fooding at Apple, but basically using your own products and essentially trying to use great taste and judgment in how you design products. And so in a way, I think the older I've gotten, the more I'm leaning into taste, judgment, and intuition for product development.
But I think when it comes to trading, to kind of take it back to crypto and investing, it is generally probably a good idea to use data and to look at the numbers and not only rely on your own intuition for most people.
You have analyzed, I don't know, billions of transactions or at least millions.
I think tens of billions of transactions like our platform.
That is a lot.
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Chapter 6: How do institutions impact the current crypto landscape?
And what have you observed about human behavior? Because people can't lie on chain.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, there's a lot. You could probably write a book about that. I mean... There's a few different things. Last time I was in Dubai, actually one thing I was talking about is how most people lose money on meme coins. And there's a few people that make a lot of money. And the ones that make the most money are actually the meme coin trading platforms. People are quite optimistic, I guess.
Nice way to put it. About their own abilities to trade on-chain. But in reality... It's pretty hard, actually, to outcompete the market or to beat the smartest money.
Chapter 7: What strategies can new investors adopt for on-chain trading?
And so one thing we do a lot at Nansen is to measure, you know, what is smart money?
Yeah, what do they do?
And so smart money investors, I mean, the way we sort of define it loosely is that these are addresses that have really high P&L, right? So they're consistently very good at trading or investing. And sometimes you can be smart money, but then you can lose your status and become, we even label them in that platform as former smart money, which is kind of funny.
But if I go back to say like 2022, there were a lot of people that people considered smart money, think of three arrows, for example, that ended up being not so smart money. And so over the years, I think one thing we've learned is actually pay less attention to the names and just look at the behavior.
So just because you have a famous fund doesn't mean that you're going to be really successful in investing, actually. We have a lot of smart money addresses that we've tagged. We have no idea who they are because they're just some person in their, I don't know, bedroom trading and they're doing super well, but no one knows who they are. And there's a bunch of those.
I want to know. So smart money, I used to think it is just people that trade very smart and like very strategically.
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Chapter 8: What are the key features of Nansen's new AI-driven product?
But in terms of what you just described, being famous is also smart money.
It used to be part of the definition, but we've actually removed that. So now it's all behavior. We discovered that the names don't actually reflect that much whether people are going to be successful at trading. And so we eliminated that component. And now you have to earn the smart money status.
based on your own on-chain trading performance so if you're really good at trading on hyperliquid you could become a smart perps trader which is kind of a subcategory of smart money if you're good at you know trading meme coins um even flipping nfts yield farming there's a bunch of different ways you can become smart money but the way i think about it is that you have
probably hundreds of millions of addresses that you could be looking at on-chain. And so what we try to do is surface the signal and highlight the few thousand addresses that are actually smart and you want to follow what they're doing. I do follow what's happening on-chain. Increasingly, I'm using our mobile app called Nansen AI because I just find it's more convenient.
And it's an agentic user experience. I can just talk to it. I don't have to look at all the dashboards and slice the data, filter it, sort. I can just go into the app and then ask it. which tokens are smart money buying today. And then it tells me. And then I can be like, who are the top traders on Hyperliquid in the last seven days? And it'll tell me.
And, you know, oh, I've heard about, I don't know, X402 tokens. What are they? And what are the top tokens? And then it tells me. And soon... You're going to be able to say, okay, cool. Number two there looks interesting. Put $100 into it and you can execute trades directly in an integrated user experience within the app.
Can I say I want to stop loss of 20%?
That's a good question. Not in the first version, but you will be able to do that. For now, it's only spot swaps. So like market orders on-chain with the spot trading.
I love that. And people are talking about strategies. Like if you could, in traditional finance, if you could follow Warren Buffett's trade, then you would be very wealthy. And people are trying to copy that on chain. But I have a question. So remember people are talking about this address on Hyperliquid that could be Trump's son? Could be.
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