Nansen to Bring Crypto Intelligence Tools to Solana Early Next Year

Wallet analysis company Nansen will begin sifting Solana addresses for trading “alpha” early next year.

The software company will add coverage for Solana in Q1 2022, project leads said at the Solana conference in Lisbon on Tuesday.

Nansen made a business turning blockchain tech’s hard-coded transparency into potentially actionable trading signals for its clients. It uses a blend of public intel and heuristics to “label” addresses tied to hedge funds, banks, VCs and whales – the “smart money” for others to follow, so to speak.

Head of Institutional Sales Alexandre Caillol told CoinDesk that Nansen clients have been asking for Solana coverage. The network’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is worth over $15 billion and has 1.2 million monthly active addresses – all potential gold mines for traders who know how to read them.

“It’s for the traders,” Caillol said. “They’re concerned about OK, where are the hot contracts that are coming in? Where are the yields?’”

But getting that info for Solana isn’t quite so simple for Nansen. Solana uses a consensus mechanism that differs from Nansen’s other covered networks. It doesn’t play nice with Ethereum-based smart contracts, either. Fantom, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain all do because they’re compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

“That’s why it takes us a little while to load Solana: because it’s a different technology,” he said.

Caillol told CoinDesk that support for Celo, Avalanche, Arbitrum and Optimism, which are all EVM chains, are also on the way.