Nansen to Bring Crypto Intelligence Tools to Solana Early Next Year

Crypto wallet analysis company Nansen will begin sifting Solana addresses for trading “alpha” early next year.

The software company will add coverage for the Solana blockchain in the first quarter of next year, project leads said at the Solana conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Tuesday.

Nansen has made a business by turning blockchain technology’s hard-coded transparency into potentially actionable trading signals for its clients. It uses a blend of public intelligence and heuristics to “label” addresses tied to hedge funds, banks, venture capitalists and large investors – the “smart money” for others to follow, so to speak.

Alexandre Caillol, head of institutional sales at Nansen, told CoinDesk that Nansen clients have been asking for Solana coverage. The network’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is worth over $15 billion and has 1.2 million monthly active addresses – all potential gold mines for traders who know how to read them.

“It’s for the traders,” Caillol said. “They’re concerned about OK, where are the hot contracts that are coming in? Where are the yields?’”

Read more: Analytics Platform Nansen Expands to Fantom, Spotlighting Emerging DeFi Ecosystem

But getting that information for Solana isn’t quite so simple for Nansen. Solana uses a consensus mechanism that differs from Nansen’s other covered networks. It doesn’t work well with Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts, either. Fantom, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain all do because they are compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), Ethereum’s computation engine.

“That’s why it takes us a little while to load Solana: because it’s a different technology,” Caillol said.

Caillol told CoinDesk that support for Arbitrum, Avalanche, Celo and Optimism, which are all EVM blockchains, are also on the way.