Whale Flow

Whale Flow

Executed whale trades (not wallet transfers): side, size, price, venue, the moment they happen, merged across 15 centralized exchanges and on-chain DEX swaps on Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum.

Data sources (in order)

1. CoinLobster MCP connected? Use its tools, fully qualified: coinlobster:whale_trades (recent trades; args: coin, source cex|dex|all, min_usd, limit) and coinlobster:whale_flow (hourly buy/sell USD buckets; args: coin, hours). whale_tape is a deprecated alias of whale_trades kept working for existing callers; prefer whale_trades, and fall back to whale_tape only if tools/list shows just that name.
2. Named-wallet and DEX lanes (MCP). coinlobster:onchain_whales (args: chain, coin, min_usd, limit) returns executed DEX swaps on Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum, each carrying the wallet and the DEX. coinlobster:hl_whales (args: coin, limit) returns Hyperliquid whale fills WITH the wallet address, and coinlobster:hl_wallet (args: address) opens that account's live book (positions, leverage, net bias). Hyperliquid is the one venue whose public feed names the account on both sides of a fill, so an HL row is followable in a way a CEX row is not. Say which lane a number came from.
3. No MCP: curl the keyless API (GET only, JSON):

   curl -s "https://coinlobster.com/api/public/crypto-whales?coin=BTC&limit=50"
   curl -s "https://coinlobster.com/api/public/onchain-whales?chain=ethereum&limit=50"
   curl -s "https://coinlobster.com/api/public/hyperliquid/whales?coin=ETH&limit=50"
   curl -s "https://coinlobster.com/api/public/whale-flow-history?coin=BTC&hours=168"
   

   Keyless, the measurement window on the three trade feeds is whatever the returned rows span; compute it from the min/max timestamps and state it. whale-flow-history is the REST twin of the whale_flow tool: hourly { t, buyUsd, sellUsd, netUsd, count, price } rows, flow on the same grid as the hourly close, 7 days keyless (maxFreeHours), 30 (proHours) on a coinlobster.com website subscription. An API key does not widen this REST route; on an agent surface the 30-day window is the whale_flow MCP tool on a developer plan. available: false means no recorded whale hours for that coin yet; coverage.hoursWithPrice says how much of the window actually has a price behind it.
4. Quick read without parsing: fetch https://coinlobster.com/crypto-whales.md (markdown table of the latest trades).

More endpoints and field meanings: see references/endpoints.md.

How to read the feed

• Whale thresholds scale with liquidity: $500K+ spot ($1M+ futures) on BTC, $1M+ spot ($2M+ futures) on ETH, $400K+ spot ($800K+ futures) on top majors, $100K+ spot ($200K+ futures) on everything else. A $400K whale trade on a small cap is a bigger event than $2M on BTC. On-chain, swaps are recorded from $100K on Ethereum and $25K on Base and Arbitrum, but the keyless views are floored higher: /api/public/onchain-whales and whale_trades with source: dex show $250K+ only, while the dedicated onchain_whales tool serves the full recorded floor.
• Clusters beat single trades. Multiple large same-direction trades within minutes suggest coordinated positioning. One trade is one trader's opinion.
• Counter-trend whales are the strongest tell: large buys during a selloff mean someone with size is stepping in against the crowd.
• CEX vs DEX divergence matters: DEX accumulation without CEX buying often precedes CEX flow; note which lane each trade came from. On MCP, whale_trades rows carry a source field (cex|dex). Over REST the lane is the endpoint you called: /crypto-whales is CEX only, /onchain-whales is DEX only.
• Net flow direction: sum buy USD vs sell USD over the window (whale_flow does this hourly). Report the split, not just the direction ("62% buys over 4h" beats "whales are buying").
• Per-trade market conditions: REST whale-trade rows carry a marketConditions object (funding and open interest across venues AT trade time). That is the joined context agents usually need a second provider for: a $4M buy traded while funding sat negative is a different fact than the same buy at extreme positive funding. Quote it when it changes the read.

Rules

• Data is descriptive history. Report what whales DID, never predict what price will do. No advice.
• Only BTC/USD streams real-time on the free view. Every other coin is 15-min delayed, EXCEPT any trade $1M+, which streams live on any coin. Treat delayed rows as delayed and say so. Keyless DEX rows floor at $250K on /api/public/onchain-whales and on the merged whale_trades tape; say which view a number came from.
• Always state the window and coin you measured ("last 24h, BTC, CEX+DEX").
• Check the newest row's timestamp against the current time; if the freshest trade is hours old, report the feed as quiet since then rather than presenting stale trades as "right now".
• Few rows is not an error: the free feed floors mean only whale-sized trades stream keyless (BTC/USD from $500K spot, plus every $1M+ trade on any coin live), so 8 rows in 24h means 8 trades that size, not a broken feed. Name the floor when the row count is the story. If every row is one venue, say so.