Crypto investors keep a close eye on Smart Money (also called “intelligent money” or “smart capital”). The term refers to capital controlled or managed by professional investors, institutional players, or seasoned traders. Such market participants often have insider information unavailable to most retail traders. For that reason, copying Smart-Money trades is at the core of many investors’ strategies.
The Quickex editorial team has found out what large investors—the so-called whales—were buying and selling in mid-June 2025. This overview may inspire market participants who are looking for promising coins to buy or sell.
What Smart Money Is Buying
According to Nansen, between 9 and 15 June 2025 Smart Money was actively accumulating seven cryptocurrencies. Here is where crypto whales invest:
- PENDLE. A transaction by the Arca fund attracted the market’s attention. The company withdrew a large amount of tokens from Binance—an operation that may indicate an intention to move the coins into cold storage. Notably, Arca stocked up on PENDLE just as the token’s price was recovering after a decline.
- RNDR. The cryptocurrency caught the eye of GSR. After buying the token, the team spent a week withdrawing coins from Coinbase and transferring them via Wormhole to another network.
- ZIG. The coin interested an anonymous whale. Purchases by a number of top wallets have also been recorded throughout the month.
- SKY (MKR). The token is being bought back by the DAO Ready Player wallet. The project became interested in the coin amid the protocol’s rebranding.
- AAVE. The coin has come under the crosshairs of several large traders. Remarkably, investors are buying AAVE despite its strong price.
- AERO. Like AAVE, the token is being actively snapped up by traders who are committing sizable sums to the project.
- LINK. Another coin in the AERO and AAVE group that traders are aggressively accumulating.
Smart-money tokens deals. Source: Nansen
Analysts at Lookonchain, for their part, pointed to several other coins that whales find interesting these days. The leader is Ethereum. On 18 June, one whale bought 3,000 ETH for $7.48 million. Over the last four days he has acquired 11,500 ETH worth $29 million. There are also other whales spending millions of dollars on Ethereum while the market is dipping because of the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East.
At the same time, on-chain data show Ethereum whale activity in sales. People noted the sell-off from some dormant investors whose wallets had long been inactive. Such transactions should not be considered a trend: in most cases they simply reflect the wish to lock in profits accumulated long ago.
Memecoin PEPE has also come into large investors’ sights. Lookonchain noted that on 17 June an unknown whale withdrew 500.6 billion tokens worth $5.2 million from Binance.
It is noteworthy that whale activity in the market is far from its peak levels, as indicated by the Exchange Whale Ratio metric from CryptoQuant, which tracks whale activity on crypto exchanges.
Which Coins Whales Are Selling
- APEX. The main seller is Dragonfly. Smart money investments in crypto nowadays definitely avoid APEX.
- KTA. The coin’s price is under pressure from sales by an anonymous whale who previously earned more than 7,000% on the token. Tracking his operations may inspire new trades.
- IMX. Alliance DAO has completely off-loaded the token.
- ATH. Numerous transactions by whales resembling arbitrage have been recorded: large investors actively moved tokens between trading platforms.
- ALT. After a price pump, Binance Labs and IOSG began unloading the tokens they received from an unlock.
According to Lookonchain, whales are also actively shedding HYPE. For instance, on 17 June one large investor sold 126 772 HYPE for $5.31 million at an average price of $42, netting roughly $2.89 million in profit.
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Earlier, the Quickex editorial team examined why JP Morgan could become the new Tether (USDT).