Nansen Copytrader Overlay
Nansen is a data layer only in this skill: PM PnL quality overlay + address-summary/wallet quality. It is not smart-money-labeled copytrading — Nansen's smart-money labels are not Polymarket-specific, and no code path here calls the labels endpoint at all.
When to use this skill
Simmer is about to execute a copytrading rebalance into a specific
Polymarket market and has a candidate leader list (wallets + an existing
wallet_score). Use this skill to re-rank that list using Nansen's
Polymarket-specific PnL data before Simmer acts on it.
Do not use this skill to:
- Generate smart-money labels or entity classifications (out of scope — see framing above).
- Place trades. Every function and CLI command here is signal-only; the
caller (Simmer's execution wrapper) owns the actual
--livegate.
Core signal: pnl-by-market first
The primary ranking signal is pnl_by_market(market_id) — who is actually
profitable in the target market, not a wallet's broad trading history.
pnl_by_address / trades_by_address (broad history) and
address_summary (cheap wallet-quality pre-filter) are secondary —
they refine the market-specific score, they never replace it. A wallet
absent from the target market's leaderboard gets tagged
NOT_IN_MARKET_LEADERBOARD and keeps its original score with a small
discount, rather than a fabricated 50/50 blend against a signal that
doesn't exist.
Running it
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install pytest # for tests only; the skill itself is stdlib-only
export NANSEN_API_KEY=... # your own Nansen key — sent as the `apiKey` header
No nansen CLI required: calls go straight to https://api.nansen.ai/api/v1
over HTTPS. Bring-your-own-key — every call spends your Nansen credits,
so --max-wallets (default 30) and --max-credits (default 45) are
deliberately conservative.
Getting a Nansen key
Sign up at nsn.ai/simmer, then copy your key from the Nansen dashboard. Signing up through that link gets you the Simmer partner discount on your subscription and API credits.
What a run costs. Credit prices measured directly against the live API on 2026-08-11:
| Endpoint | Credits |
|---|---|
pnl-by-market (primary signal, once per run) |
5 |
top-holders |
5 |
address-summary, pnl-by-address, trades-by-address, market-screener |
1 |
account (balance check) |
0 |
At the default caps a full run costs about 45 credits. Note that Nansen's
published price list currently shows pnl-by-market at 1 credit; we are billed
5, so budget from the table above rather than from their docs.
Which plan you need. Nansen's free tier gives 100 starter credits plus 10
per day, which covers roughly two full runs and is enough to try the skill. For
regular use, Pro (2,000 credits per month) covers about 45 runs. Check your
balance any time with GET /api/v1/account, which is free.
Rank leaders for a market:
python3 nansen_skill_cli.py copytrader-overlay \
--market-id 12345 \
--leaders leaders.json \
--top-n 5
leaders.json:
[
{"proxy_address": "0xabc...", "owner_address": "0xowner...", "wallet_score": 0.8}
]
World Cup market variant (adds WC-specialist bonus to the secondary signal):
python3 nansen_skill_cli.py copytrader-overlay \
--market-id 12345 --leaders leaders.json --worldcup
Experimental live insider scan (always dry-run — see below):
python3 nansen_skill_cli.py insider-scan --market-id 12345 67890
Programmatic use (what copytrading_strategy.py would actually call):
from nansen_copytrader_overlay_general import enrich_leaders
enriched = enrich_leaders(
leaders=raw_leaders, # [{proxy_address, owner_address, wallet_score}, ...]
market_id=target_market_id, # the market Simmer is about to copytrade into
dry_run=not is_live,
)
target_wallets = [l["proxy_address"] for l in enriched[:top_n]]
Proxy vs. owner wallets — must be explicit
Nansen indexes Polymarket activity (prediction-market/...) by the
proxy wallet (the contract Polymarket trades through), and profiler
data (profiler/...) by the owner (signing/EOA) wallet.
address-summary is a prediction-market endpoint, so it takes the
proxy — passing the owner returns an all-zero row.
owner_address is optional on input: it rides along on every
pnl-by-market row and is read from there when omitted. That harvest
covers only about 40% of the leaderboard — 30 of 50 rows on the market
used to verify this carried the placeholder "0x" rather than a real
owner, which is treated as absent.
| Field | Used for | Endpoints |
|---|---|---|
proxy_address (or legacy address) |
Polymarket-specific data | pnl-by-market, pnl-by-address, trades-by-address, top-holders, address-summary |
owner_address (optional) |
General on-chain wallet quality | historical-balances |
A leader missing proxy_address is tagged MISSING_PROXY_ADDRESS and
skipped (kept at its original score, discounted).
A leader whose market position has no usable cost basis — none at all
(airdropped/gifted) or dust under $10 — is tagged NO_COST_BASIS /
DUST_COST_BASIS and its ROI component contributes zero rather than a
flat stand-in. It keeps its profit/loss tag and stays eligible for the
leaderboard-rank bonus (realised PnL rank is real evidence). Rationale: the
typical measured ROI score is ~0.09, so any generous default for an
uncomputable ROI would rank the wallets we know least about above the ones we
measured. Missing owner_address
is tagged MISSING_OWNER_ADDRESS for the record but does not gate the
secondary signal — every call in that path is proxy-keyed.
Measured leaders always rank above unmeasured ones
Each returned leader carries nansen_measured. Leaders with a usable Nansen
signal are ranked as one block above every leader without one; within each
block the order is by adjusted_score.
This matters whenever your leader list is longer than max_wallets, or when
some lookups fail. The two scores are not on the same scale — an unmeasured
leader keeps base * 0.9, a measured one gets 0.5*base + 0.5*quality, which
only exceeds 0.9 when quality is above 0.8. Ranking them together would
promote wallets the overlay could not evaluate above nearly every wallet it
did, which is the opposite of the point.
If every leader is measured (the intended use), ranking is purely by
adjusted_score and this rule changes nothing.
Credit guards (hard, not advisory)
Nansen bills per call against your key, so every enrichment run is protected by:
max_wallets(default 30): leaders beyond the cap are never enriched — they keep their original score, taggedCREDIT_GUARD_MAX_WALLETS, and are ranked below every leader that was measured (see below).CreditGuard(max_credits=...)(default 45): a hard ceiling on the credits spent across the whole run, with a 5-minute TTL cache so re-fetching the same market/wallet doesn't double-spend. It charges the real per-endpoint cost (5 forpnl-by-marketandtop-holders, 1 for the rest), not one unit per call, so the number means what you think it means. If the budget runs out mid-run, remaining leaders are taggedCREDIT_GUARD_EXHAUSTEDand kept at their original score — the run does not crash, and it does not keep spending.- Preflight balance check: before spending anything, the CLI calls the free
account()endpoint. If your balance can't cover even the primarypnl-by-marketcall it refuses outright; if your balance is below the budget it warns and proceeds, since the budget is a cap rather than a prediction and most runs spend well under it. A failed balance check never blocks the run. - No
profiler labelswrapper exists, so nothing here can call it (100 credits for common labels, 500 for premium). The live insider scan's known-entity discount uses a free local allowlist instead. address_summaryas a pre-filter: a wallet only gets the more expensivepnl_by_address+trades_by_addresspull if its cheapaddress_summarywin-rate/resolved-count check clearsMIN_RESOLVED_MARKETSfirst.
Tune both via the CLI (--max-wallets, --max-credits) or by passing
max_wallets= / guard=CreditGuard(max_credits=...) directly.
Live insider scan — experimental, dry-run only
nansen_live_insider_scan.py / insider-scan is not launchable for live
trading. scan_live_markets(dry_run=False) and --live both hard-refuse
(LiveTradingNotSupportedError), because two things are unconfirmed
against the live API:
- Owner/proxy handling: scanned wallets come from PM trade data (proxy
addresses), but
historical_balancesis a profiler/owner-indexed endpoint —wallet_age_daysmay be silently wrong until there's an owner mapping for scanned wallets. HIGH_NO_ENTRYprice semantics: whether Nansen quotes NO-side trades in YES terms or the NO token's own price changes whether this flag means conviction or the opposite. Unconfirmed — see the module docstring.
Removing the guard requires a deliberate code change after both are verified — not a flag flip.
Tests
source .venv/bin/activate
pytest tests/ -v
Status
This skill ships as research tooling, not an allocation signal. The
scoring weights (the 50/50 blend, MIN_RESOLVED_MARKETS, the tag penalties)
are reasoned defaults. They have not been fitted or backtested, and no
forward test has shown that the re-ranking improves realised copytrading
returns. Read DISCLAIMER.md before acting on the output.
Credits
Built by Alyna Takahashi (@alyna123t), who wrote the adapter, both overlays and the insider scan. Code review by Nick (@BridgeAISocial). Published and maintained by Simmer. Nansen provides the underlying Polymarket data.