Lessons
🔍 On-chain
Explorers, wallets, smart money. Read the blockchain itself.
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Block explorers
The whole ledger is public. Learn to open it and read it.
- The chain is publicYour bank's ledger is a locked vault: only the bank sees the full picture. A public blockchain flips that…
- Anatomy of an explorerA block explorer (Etherscan is the famous one for Ethereum, but every chain has its own) is simply a website…
- Reading a transactionOpen any transaction page and the same skeleton appears: From (who signed it), To (who or what received it)…
- Under the hood: internals & logsThe transaction you see is just the button-press. When it calls a smart contract, the contract's code runs and…
- Review: open the ledgerQuick recap: the ledger is public and permanent, addresses are pseudonymous not anonymous, and an explorer is…
Reading transactions
Transfers, approvals, swaps, mints: learn what each really looks like.
- Transfer or contract call?Every transaction is one of two species. A simple transfer sends coin to a regular address, with the input…
- Approvals in the wildThe Crypto course warned you about signing blindly. Now you will see what those signatures look like from the…
- Decoding a swapOn a stock exchange your order disappears into a black box. On a DEX, the whole trade is one public…
- NFT mints & salesNFTs leave the same paper trail as everything else. A mint appears as a transfer FROM the zero address…
- Review: name that transactionYou can now identify the four big species in the wild: plain transfers (empty input data), approvals (spending…
Wallet anatomy
Every address tells a story: age, habits, identity, and where the money went.
- EOAs vs contract walletsTwo kinds of accounts live on-chain. An EOA (externally owned account) is what the Crypto course gave you: one…
- Nonces & fingerprintsEvery address wears its biography in public. The nonce counts every transaction it ever sent. The first…
- Labels & tagsExplorers decorate famous addresses with labels: 'Binance 8', 'Vitalik.eth', 'Tornado Cash'. These come from…
- Following the moneyTracing funds is just reading transactions in a row: money leaves address A, lands at B, splits toward C and…
- Review: wallet whispererThis unit turned addresses into characters: key-controlled EOAs vs code-controlled contract wallets, nonces…
First investigations
Trace a trade, autopsy a rug pull, stress-test a claim. Detective work begins.
- Trace a swap end-to-endA friend messages you a transaction hash: 'I swapped and got a terrible price. Was I hacked??' You have…
- Anatomy of a rug pullA rug pull is theft with a public paper trail. Squid Game token (Nov 2021): holders were code-blocked from…
- Verifying claims on-chainAfter FTX collapsed in November 2022 with a hole of roughly $8B, exchanges rushed to publish 'proof of…
- Your investigation toolkitEvery investigation you've run this league (the swap, the rug, the reserves) followed the same skeleton…
- Boss: The chain readerNo permission, no expiry, no gatekeeper. Every skill in this league stands on that one radical property.
Whale watching
Big wallets leave big footprints. Learn to read them without being fooled.
- Who moves marketsOn a public blockchain, every wallet's balance is visible, and a few wallets are enormous. Roughly 2% of…
- Exchange inflows & outflowsCoins sitting in a private wallet can't be sold on an exchange. They have to be deposited first. So when…
- Accumulation patternsWhales rarely buy their whole position in one splashy trade, since that would move the price against them…
- On-chain cost basisBecause every transfer is timestamped, you can look up the market price at the moment any coin last moved (a…
- Whale watching: reviewFour tools now in your kit: whale size is relative to liquidity, exchange flows hint at intent (with honest…
Labels & cohorts
Carefully turning anonymous addresses into funds, foundations and holder tribes.
- Entity labelingRaw addresses are anonymous strings, but behaviour betrays identity. Analytics firms label addresses as…
- Cohorts: old hands vs new moneySlice holders by how long their coins have sat still and two tribes appear. Long-term holders (in Bitcoin…
- Insider watchingRemember vesting schedules from the Crypto course's tokenomics lessons? On-chain, you can watch them play out…
- When labels lieLabels are guesses that hardened into UI. Address ownership changes hands, exchanges rotate wallets, one…
- Labels & cohorts: reviewThis unit turned the blockchain from a wall of addresses into a cast of characters: exchanges, market makers…
Copy-danger
Why blindly following 'smart money' is a trap, and what the signals are really for.
- Why copy-trading failsThe dream: find a genius wallet, mirror its trades, get rich. The reality: by the time their buy confirms…
- Wash trading & painted chartsOn a blockchain, nothing stops you from selling a token to yourself: wallet A sells to wallet B, both yours…
- Honeypots & bait walletsSome scams are aimed precisely at people who do what you're learning: watch wallets and follow them. A…
- What the signals are FORSo smart-money data can be laggy, fakeable and context-blind. Is it useless? No. It's just miscast as a trade…
- Copy-danger: reviewYou now know why copying fails (lag, sizing, hidden context), how charts get painted (wash trading), and how…
Tools of the trade
Explorers, watchlists, alerts and a daily loop: build your own on-chain radar.
- The tool landscapeOn-chain tooling stacks into four rough layers. Block explorers show raw truth: one transaction, one address…
- Building a watchlistThe blockchain firehose never stops: millions of transactions a day. The analysts who extract signal don't…
- Alerts that matterStaring at dashboards all day is a job; well-designed alerts do the staring for you. The craft is in the…
- The analyst's daily loopGood on-chain analysts run a loop, not a binge: check overnight alerts, sweep the watchlist for anything…
- Boss: Smart moneyDeposit-to-sell is the hint; size-versus-liquidity is the stakes. Together they justify spending your…
Exchange & stablecoin flows
Follow the money on and off exchanges. Where coins sit tells you what holders plan.
- The long goodbyeOne of the most famous on-chain charts: bitcoin held on exchanges has been in a multi-year decline, from…
- Inflow spikesA sudden spike of coins flowing INTO exchanges is the classic sell-pressure alarm: someone just staged…
- Dry powderStablecoins are the crypto market's cash pile, and unlike bank balances, you can watch them on-chain. Total…
- Loaded and readyTotal stablecoin supply is the whole ammunition depot, but stablecoins sitting ON exchanges are shells already…
- Flow checkYou've learned to read the tides: exchange balances as potential sell supply, inflow spikes as yellow flags…
On-chain valuation
The blockchain remembers what everyone paid. Turn that memory into valuation gauges.
- Realized capMarket cap values every coin at today's price, even coins untouched since 2011. Realized cap does something…
- MVRV: the profit gaugeDivide market cap by realized cap and you get MVRV, short for Market Value to Realized Value. At MVRV 2, the…
- NUPL and profit wavesNUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss) takes the gap between market cap and realized cap and expresses it as a…
- HODL wavesEvery coin has an age: the time since it last moved. Sort all supply into age bands (under 1 month, 1-6…
- Valuation checkRealized cap remembers what holders paid. MVRV compares that memory to today's price. NUPL turns the gap into…
Derivatives data
Funding, open interest, liquidations, options: read the leverage that moves crypto prices.
- Funding as a crowd gaugeYou met funding rates in the Trading course as a cost of holding perpetual futures. Now flip the lens: funding…
- Open interestOpen interest (OI) is the total value of all derivative positions currently open. Rising OI means new money…
- Liquidation mapsEvery leveraged position has a liquidation price: the level where the exchange force-closes it. Liquidation…
- Options tell on the crowdFrom the Options course you know puts are downside insurance and calls are upside tickets. Crypto options…
- Leverage checkFunding shows which side is crowded and paying. Open interest shows how much leverage is stacked. Liquidation…
Synthesis
Combine flows, valuation and leverage into one honest thesis, and know when to distrust it.
- Building a thesisOne metric is a data point; three families of metrics agreeing is a thesis. The analyst's craft is layering…
- Data miragesOn-chain data looks objective. It's a public ledger, after all. But mirages abound. Metrics get backtested on…
- When on-chain failsMarch 2020: on-chain data showed steady accumulation. Then COVID panic hit global markets and bitcoin fell…
- The graduate's dashboardThe graduate's dashboard is small on purpose: exchange flows and stablecoin positioning for supply, one…
- Boss: The on-chain analystRadical transparency of transactions (not identities) is the raw material. Everything from explorer lookups to…