Philadelphia Fed finds Bitcoin traders follow whale signals faster than Ethereum users

A Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia working paper published this month found that public notifications of large crypto transfers were followed by sharply different trading activity on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Non-whale Bitcoin wallets became active and traded in the alerted whale's direction most strongly during the first 15 minutes. Ethereum participation, by contrast, remained comparatively stable.

The Philadelphia Fed working paper matched public Whale Alert notification times with on-chain Bitcoin, Ethereum and Wrapped Bitcoin transfers through the end of 2025.

Wrapped Bitcoin, or WBTC, was observed on Ethereum. The authors defined a whale wallet as one that had made at least one transfer worth more than $50 million, excluding large wallets associated with exchanges or smart contracts. Keeping only events without another whale transaction within two hours on either side left 6,645 BTC and 5,075 ETH whale transactions.

Bitcoin's response peaked within 15 minutes

The raw data showed active non-whale Bitcoin participation rising most among small and medium wallet groups in the first 15 minutes after an alert. In full-sample regressions, buy participation increased by 14.81 percentage points for small wallets, 23.72 points for medium wallets and 3.50 points for large wallets after whale buys. Following whale sells, sell participation rose by 12.95, 29.52 and 2.95 points, respectively. The same-direction activity then waned toward normal within an hour.