A conversation with the Whale Alert team: The product started out as "looking for reasons why prices are falling" and wanted to be a tool that narrowed the gap between the powerful and the average person

Source: The Block

Celia Wan

Original title: "A Conversation with Whale Alert, One of Crypto's Most Watchdogs"

Anyone who follows the cryptography industry will have seen a tweet about "Whale Alert". It is one of Crypto's most famous Twitter accounts, with more than 232,000 followers, and tracks "Whale" addresses, those where large amounts of tokens are stored and moved. The Block spoke with The team behind Whale Alert about The story behind its development to date, The role it hopes to play in an encrypted ecosystem, and its plans for The future.

Because of the unique nature of its focus, Whale Alert also has the implicit ability to cause market volatility by Posting its observations as a "Whale Watcher".

One notable example: On May 20 of this year, Whale Alert was the first to announce the subject of a 40BTC movement, pointing out that the address might be Satoshi, causing a flurry of industry discussion. The price of bitcoin plunged from nearly $9,800 to about $9,300 within an hour of the tweet, making it hard not to marvel at the power of a Whale Alert.

In addition to Posting its tracking on Twitter, Whale Alert sells data to both professional and amateur traders. The following is The transcript of The interview, The copyright belongs to The Block, and BlockBeats has translated and arranged The original meaning without changing it:

Q: Can you share the history of Whale Alert?

A:We started crypto trading in early 2017, before the industry went crazy, when we noticed the industry lacked tools for trading, and as developers, we decided to create some of our own.

Our first tool was a social media monitor, which tracks Youtube and Reddit posts about cryptocurrencies that help predict price rises, but we can't predict when prices will fall. It was also around this time that we created the first version of Whale Alert, which was a simple BTC and ETH tracker, much less complex than today's Whale Alert, but which allowed us to see what was causing the market to fall.

Before the big drop in early 2018,We noticed that the EOS team had made a massive transfer of the ETH in its possession,The market quickly fell, and around that time, we stopped trading. A few months later, we noticed that the first version of Whale Alert was still running, and instead of shutting it down, we decided to share it with the community, which was a huge success.

Q: Whale Alert is so influential on Crypto's Twitter account that one could argue that some of its alerts have an impact on the market. Given the high level of interest in the trading community, did you expect it to be so popular?

A:At first we thought that Whale Alert would be popular among experienced traders, but it turns out that our audience is much wider. Whale Alert plays a different role than originally expected, and we are now both data providers and alarms. We can see everything happening on the blockchain, and I think that gives people a sense of security.

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Q: The Whale Alert tweet about Satoshi was so controversial that some even suggested it may have contributed to the price drop on May 20. Can you tell us why the team decided to point out that it was Satoshi's wallet?

A:We will publish an article about our views on Satoshi in the near future. This is actually a very heavy topic in the community, and we just want to make sure that when posts are posted, they don't explicitly predict who the owner is, which is why we say "maybe." Of course, we don't think the existing research rules out the possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto owns the site, and we don't think this should be overlooked.

Q: With the ongoing debate in the industry about the value of transparency in blockchain and the need for privacy in transactions, Whale Alert is at a very delicate position. How do you see the balance between privacy and transparency?

A:This is also a very vague topic. I think,People need to realize that privacy is a very rare commodityCompanies like Facebook and Google collect everything they can. In our current economic system, privacy is often the side of money and power, as ** has proven. The goal of Whale Alert is to eliminate this demographic (like Stellar cofounder Jed McCaleb) as an advantage over the average user, and we feel like we need to use it on a massive scale.

And bank transfer, credit card, PayPal, compared to traditional payment methods such as blocks in the chain of individual transfer information harder to track, and the larger participants such as trading platform is relatively easy to identify and track, with the increase of trust, they even can benefit from this information, which is why many trading platform to actively cooperate with us, to improve our tracking information.

The Panama Papers are a trove of secret documents uncovered by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2016. They contain 11.5m files from mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm, which has listed detailed data on 214,000 offshore financial companies since the 1970s.It exposes the hidden, unrevealed foreign assets of politicians, the rich and powerful.

Q: What products will the team want to explore in the future?

A:We have a lot of ideas, some of which are very exciting to us.We are currently developing an improved version of the Whale Alert analysis system.It's a huge project, and we're launching a new website and analytics system based on it this week.

The blockchain industry as a whole suffers from two major shortcomings: first, a lack of transparency, and second, a focus on getting rich. To expand acceptance, we need to show that blockchain is not just a solution that makes people rich, but that it is actually being used and that it is safe to use. At the moment, the reputation of blockchain is still not very good, which is what we need to solve next.

The original link: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/daily/68664/a-conversation-with-whale-alert-one-of-crypto-twitters-most-mysterious-watchdogs

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