• According to Santiment, whales are currently accumulating three altcoins while losing interest in three others.
• REN, BAND and AAVE are currently seeing strong a growth in whale addresses.

In one of its new reports, crypto analytics firm Santiment has identified three altcoins that are seeing a growing population of whales. And as Santiment notes, those that have a large share of the market capital significantly influence a cryptocurrency and ultimately determine where a market price moves next.

Whales love REN, BAND and AAVE

Using the new “Whale Holder Distribution Sansheets Model,” Santiment singles out REN as an increasingly popular target for crypto whales. The altcoin was ranked #60 by market cap at the time of writing, trading at $0.83 (+25% over the last 7 days).

“Ren Protocol 81 to 93 addresses holding at least 1 million tokens in just the past two days. As you may guess, this is quite significant, and the impact is already beginning to show with a +21% price gain in the past 24 hours,” as Santiment elicits.

The BAND protocol, probably Chainlink’s best-known challenger in the decentralized oracle space, also has an increasing concentration of whales (addresses with more than 10,000 BAND). As Santiment analyzed, the whale addresses of the BAND protocol have grown from 49 to 82 in a little less than four months.

During the same period, the BAND price has also surged. “As long as we keep seeing this number climb, it’s a great sign for a token that is often pegged as an asset that simply follows Chainlink,” Santiment said. At press time, BAND was trading at $12.90 (+7% over the last 7 days) and ranked #103 by market cap.

A far more well-known cryptocurrency that has been in the spotlight repeatedly in recent weeks is AAVE (ranked 14th by market cap). The DeFi token is seeing continued strong interest from whales. The rise of the Ethereum-based DeFi token since January 01, when it was priced at $83.50, to $494.50 (at the time of writing) has been meteoric. And as Santiment’s data shows, whales may have played a significant role:

Aave has been making major waves over the past week, and DeFi has been an amazing presence as a whole over the past 6 months. But taking a particular look at AAVE, it’s quite clear that there are more and more heavy hitters entering the space. In the past month, those holding at least 1,000 tokens has grown from 266 to 339.

Whales lose interest in BNB, YFI and CEL

Among the losers in terms of whale addresses, Santiment currently sifts Binance Coin (BNB), Yearn Finance (YFI) and Celsius (CEL). Binance Coin’s 10,000+ token holder club has dropped from 154 to 147 in just the last 3 days.

Yearn Finance, the darling of the DeFi community through the end of 2020, is struggling to keep up with the growth of other top DeFi coins, such as Aave, Sushi, Uniswap, and Compound, according to Santiment. The number of addresses with at least 100 YFI tokens has dropped from 43 to 39 (about a -10% drop) in the last 3 days.

Meanwhile, Santiment is seeing a “massive drop” in Celsius Whales (100,000+ token addresses):

There were 156 addresses with at least 100,000 CEL a year ago, 86 a week ago, and just 79 addresses now. It goes without saying that this is a highly concerning sign.

CEL, the native token of the Celcius platform benefited in a big way from the success of the lending platform in recent weeks. Last month, Celcius reported that it had surpassed $5.3 billion in total assets under management in less than three years after launching their mobile app. Previously, Celcius reported that it acquired more than 125,000 new customers in a very short period of time and has a total of more than 340,000 active users worldwide.