Whale
In short A whale is a wallet holding enough of a token that its buys or sells can visibly move the price, especially in small, thinly traded markets.
A whale is a wallet, or a group of wallets under one owner, that holds enough of a token to move its price with a single trade. There is no official threshold. For Bitcoin, 1,000 BTC is a common convention, though analysts draw the line in different places. In a small token on Solana or BNB Chain, a wallet holding 1 to 2 percent of supply can already qualify, because the label depends on how deep the liquidity is.
On an automated market maker, the price comes from the reserves in a liquidity pool, and every trade shifts those reserves along a pricing curve. A sell that is large relative to the pool pushes the price down sharply, and a large buy pushes it up. In a thin pool, one wallet can cause a double-digit percentage swing.
This matters because concentrated ownership is a risk. If a handful of wallets control most of the circulating supply, their decisions set the price, and a sell can crash it before smaller holders can react. Whale buying can lift a token, but it can also draw in followers before the buyer sells into them. Wallet-tracking tools show moves only after they happen, so you are always reacting late.
Before buying a small token, open its holder list on a block explorer and sort the top addresses into categories. Typical groups are the liquidity pool contract, burn addresses, exchange wallets, locked or vesting contracts, and ordinary wallets. Locked and vesting balances are potential future selling pressure, so check their unlock dates. If the top ten ordinary wallets own a large share, one exit can hurt you, and wallets funded from the same source are often one entity split up to look spread out.
Two traps come up often. A large transfer is not always a sale: a whale shuffling tokens between its own wallets may mean nothing. And copying a whale's trades can leave you buying exactly when that holder is selling.