Reviewing NFT Tools Part 2: My Review of Nansen
My honest and overly long review of my Nansen Standard subscription. With an infographic tl;dr!
Nansen: An Overview
Today, I’ll be reviewing Nansen.ai. Nansen is an NFT, defi, and token analytics platform with subscription options currently (as of 3/28/22) ranging from a limited / “Lite” free plan1 to the “Alpha” plan, which costs a jaw-dropping $30,000 annually or $9,000 quarterly! You can pay via fiat or crypto, but the company only gives its prices in USD.
In the most expensive subscription tier, the service also includes a private Discord community, “War Room Calls,” and networking features that I can only imagine involve top-shelf liquor and smoke-filled rooms that are not in the metaverse. This tier also offers the standard “…and much more!” For $3,000 a month, there better be more, like some way to outsource annoying tasks like laundry or perhaps breathing. I should mention I did not try this tier. I paid $149 per month for the “Standard” plan.
By far the most expensive of any of the options I’ve reviewed, Nansen’s unique feature is the “Smart Money,” which purports to be a listing of the “most profitable” (or, according to some sources, “most active”) wallets. Since the company brands itself with the slogan “Follow the Smart Money,” you can reasonably conclude that the major benefit this service offers is data that facilitates wallet copy trading, or data patterns that let the average or new trader copy the “whales.”
My Experience with Nansen
Several months ago, Nansen was one of the first NFT tools that came across my radar when it was mentioned by a YouTuber whose content I trust. I subscribed to Nansen’s “Standard” monthly plan ($149/USD per month) for about 4 months from approximately late October to early March.
At first, I felt that it was good value, especially because I was newer to the NFT space and struggling to find quality projects. However, I was annoyed by the process of renewing my subscription, I found the UI and customization options lacking, and began to have some concerns about the “Smart Money” concept. I ultimately found myself using competing tools far more and cancelled.
That is not to say the experience was entirely negative. I did feel that Nansen had some good features.
What I Liked about Nansen
As a novice trader, it was helpful to me to see what was happening in the market in (sort of close to) real time, combined with flags like “Smart Money” or the wallet categories Nansen imposes on various wallets (e.g., “Epic trader”).
Although there was some confusion about the wallet tracking feature – since it seemed like they offered this during the two-week trial, then it wasn't part of the “Standard” subscription tier, then it was – I found it helpful and motivating to track my own wallet and evaluate my own ROI and losses.
There were many options to customize alerts and have them appear in either Telegram or Discord, though the onboarding process for doing this was slightly confusing & I wish Nansen had made a wizard or template to streamline it.
The problem I had with renewing my subscription was decidedly obnoxious, but the people who helped me were friendly & helpful enough. Even though hours are weeks in NFT time, they did resolve my issue by the end of that day and in the real world, that’s pretty fast.
What I Didn’t Like about Nansen
The data was often delayed up to 15 minutes and you have to manually reload the pages for fresh data. 15 minutes is huge in NFT’s: Most popular public mints sell out in fewer than 5 minutes, and 15 minutes can be the difference between listing an item on secondary when the market is pumping, and not even being able to list due to yet another OpenSea screw-up.
Copy-trading is a terrible strategy for the current market and for most average or novice traders unless they have exceptionally high liquidity. Here’s why: The “Smart Money” mints almost everything. Is it really “smart” to just throw capital at everything and coast on what sticks? Is it “smart” to throw money at the same everything just because someone labeled “smart” did so? This might have worked several months ago, or may work for someone trading only from the secondary market, but even then, Nansen’s limitations may be serious. When I was using Nansen, there were no data points about token rarity, which matters a lot for secondary market purchases and sales. Even if you use Nansen’s alerts features to send Telegram or Discord notifications to your device when certain wallets sell, you may ironically find that it’s hard to separate signal from noise because those wallets trade so heavily. Without knowing rarity, too, it can be difficult to evaluate the reasoning driving these trades. Unless you have an exceptional amount of time to track exactly what moves are made and when, and know how to contextualize those moves into the market and the collection (which Nansen doesn’t do – pretty much nobody can automate that), it’s very hard to decide on an optimal project entry or exit strategy. Just buying or minting a thing because the “whales” do so is a great way to lose money. Please don't ask me how I know!
I wished there had been more ways to leverage or analyze Nansen’s data, like you can on Dune Analytics. For example, I would’ve loved to be able to download data relating to two collections and assess potential correlations. Or to categorize specific collections and track their movement over time. Since providing those features could potentially provide Nansen with free crowd-sourced analysis, it seems strange that they can’t implement something like that. The “VIP” pricing tier offers CSV downloads, but I wasn’t willing to pay $1,490 a month, and again, since Nansen could theoretically profit from this analysis, it seems like it goes against their best interests to price so many people out of it.
I didn’t like Nansen’s UI. It is straight out of 80s/90s computing, but in a way that kills my usual baseline nostalgia for 80s/90s computers! And that’s saying a lot. I didn’t like that I couldn't customize the data or information I saw when logging in, especially since much of it related to tokens and DeFi, which weren't relevant to my goals at the time. It seemed like a lot of “noise” for a company whose actual slogan is “Surface the signal in blockchain data.”
Even though Nansen has added a lot more features in recent months, none of them are unique (if anything, they are reactionary attempts to keep up with competitors). There isn’t a clear or succinct roadmap indicating what features might have been worth waiting around for.
$149 a month is a lot of money for delayed data presented in a headache-inducing fashion. For such an expensive service, it was surprisingly hard to get Nansen to keep my subscription going. At first, I had to manually renew it each month and there was no self-service interface for updating my payment method. I received no reminder or update that my (paid) subscription was ending, much less any instructions on how to keep it going if I so desired. I was unceremoniously locked out of the paid features. I had to email them to renew and change the payment method. I spent half a day bouncing between email, their Discord, and back to email because different people had to handle this for some reason. It was shocking that this was how a tech-centric company was handling recurring subscription payments in 2021. They have since added a self-service dashboard, but to be honest, the whole experience soured me on Nansen. It shouldn't be that hard to pay for something so expensive when you actually want it.
What You Should Know About Nansen
If you love raw, unpasteurized data, you will love Nansen. Because there isn’t much there besides a lot of data and some simple charts and graphs. That could be good for some people, particularly those who prefer to see data points and analyze on their own.
I suspect Nansen’s core competencies lie not in NFT’s, but in tokens and Defi, and that the NFT services have just become an add-on revenue stream. If that is your interest, it may be a selling point. During the time I subscribed, Nansen added a few more NFT-related features, such as rarity. As of just a few days ago, Nansen has begun offering some services for free – I suspect because it has been losing market share to competitors like Icy and NFTNerds, both of which have a better UI and more visualizations than Nansen. Nansen could be great for you if your core interests are Defi or tokens.
Like many NFT tools, Nansen doesn’t support all tokens: ERC-1155 tokens, specifically, did not seem to show up in the wallet analysis features when I was using it. Also, popular storefront contracts (Mintable, and at the time, ArtBlocks) were conflated so it was hard to tell which project was being referred to. I was less experienced with NFT’s at the time than I am now, and realize this could be out of Nansen’s control. I notice that now ArtBlocks’s contracts on Nansen are differentiated based on the project. However, I can see people being confused by this; since the contracts aren’t differentiated, it may dilute the data.
“God Mode”… I’m not getting into theology here, but if Nansen’s NFT God Mode represents what a God can do, then gods are more limited than we may have thought. Nansen’s “God Mode” simply provides basic data like average price / volume, price range including min / max/ average / floor, transactions, information on top balances for a project, and what the “smart” money has done recently (held / sold, etc.). Regardless of theology or terminology, it’s just a basic project profile with a cringey name. For what Nansen charges, I expected some thunderbolt emoji or maybe a way to smite something besides my bank account. Maybe at least a cathartic placebo smiting button.
God Mode: Expectation. (I spent 3 whole minutes making this in Canva) 
God mode: Reality.
Over time, my biggest concerns began to revolve around Nansen’s “Smart Money” label and features.
I understand that this is proprietary information and that it may not be fair to say exactly who is a “Smart Money” wallet, but I still have many questions about this concept and the methods used to apply it. Some of my questions relate to ethics and transparency, since one of Nansen’s biggest selling points is that it labels “Smart Money” transactions in a way that would facilitate copy-trading.
I have variously heard “Smart Money” a la Nansen be defined as high-profitability wallets and high-activity wallets. I know of many traders who make decisions based on how they perceive the “Smart Money” to be moving. But during the time I subscribed, I began to have some methodological questions and concerns about “Smart Money:”
o Back when I was a gifted kid, we were re-tested annually. Is the “Smart Money” label permanent? Can a wallet stop being “smart,” and if so, does Nansen re-label them (hopefully not by calling them “dumb” or anything)? If so, how often are they evaluated? Do the criteria change?
o If “Smart Money” is defined by profitability, how is that determined? Does it mean gross profit over time, percentage of profitable trades, average or median profit, or something else? Because I am sure we’d agree that somebody who lucked into a huge trade once isn’t necessarily a “smarter” or better trader than someone who consistently yields 20% profits of smaller amounts.
o Are these labels universal or restricted across segments (e.g., coin or Defi trading vs. NFT’s) ? Is it possible to drill down further and identify, say, a wallet with smart PFP trades but not-so-smart gaming NFT trades?
o Since Nansen didn’t track ERC-1155 tokens when I subscribed,2 are trades using those tokens considered when defining “Smart Money”? What about trades involving storefront contracts?
o Does this assessment happen algorithmically or is there a hand-picked element? Nansen’s “About” page boasts that “more than 99% of our labels are algorithmically inferred” and that the methods for labelling wallets also include “smart-contract parsing and analysis, investigations and research by our team, user submissions, and more.” (Apparently, Nansen is very big on “and more…”).
o Does the “Smart Money” label consider the multitude of traders who use multiple wallets (e.g., a minting wallet vs. a trading wallet), and if so, how is that accounted for? How can a “Smart Money” wallet be labeled as such if the key entity of a trader is the wallet and some of the savviest traders routinely use three or more wallets?
o How many of the “Smart Money” entities have a relationship with Nansen, and what is that relationship? I can easily imagine a cynical, ultra-unethical scenario where somebody pays $3,000 a month and enters a dark, smoky metaverse room in which a Bored Ape avatar congratulates them for “becoming smart.” Considering that the key selling points of this subscription tier include early info about upcoming projects and “alpha,” a term usually used to refer to intel that adds value because of secrecy or time-sensitivity, I can also easily imagine a kind of dystopian scenario in which certain projects pay for, or arrange, access or privileged placement in the gated parts of this subscription. This would ensure a higher likelihood of “Smart Money” mints or purchases, which would manipulate the whole market. The NFT market is full of manipulation, but as I said in Part One, these analytics platforms have become de facto news organizations for NFT’s. They have the power to influence and manipulate the market. Whether you believe they already are doing so, however, probably depends on your view of humanity - and with that I suppose we’re back to God Mode again.
My Verdict
For where the market was last summer, Nansen is or was an OK tool. But today, it’s overpriced, slow, and at least one person (me) hates the UI. There are better, cheaper options out there. The price is terrible considering the UI and the problems involved with copy trading and the “Smart Money” label. My specific experience was not great because of the ridiculous hassle of having to manually renew. You get all the noise and have to learn on your own what the signals really are, so there are few reasons to use Nansen for NFT’s. I don’t think they’re bad actors or doing anything dishonest, but the UI, speed, features, and processes all seemed way out of proportion to both the price and the competition.
I can’t speak to the higher price tiers: These may work for businesses or institutional investors, or individuals familiar with data analysis who are comfortable paying $1,500 or more a month, but I don’t think that’s my audience.
And given how long this review was, I hope I haven’t alienated that audience entirely. So I’ll just say: Thanks for reading and tune tomorrow for my next review!
Disclosures and disclaimers:
Nothing in this publication should be considered financial advice. This is just my opinion.
I currently (March 28, 2022) own 3 Coniun NFT’s and 1 WGMI “token.” I have a paid monthly subscription to Icy. I paid for Nansen’s monthly “Standard” subscription from approximately early November, 2021, to the beginning of March, 2022.
No companies have paid me or given me anything for this coverage. They probably do not even know I exist. All the information about these projects was accurate as of the time I wrote this, and I have verified this information to the best of my ability. None of the links I’ve used in this post are referral links unless otherwise indicated.
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0x4E53CD9f9BF1A0C2f89E7af2Dd8F72b8f0cFC142
This “Lite” / Free plan was not available (to the best of my recollection) when I was still subscribing; it appears to be a very recent offering. At the time I subscribed, there was a $9 two-week “trial” option to Standard. Considering how many people I heard of who serially signed up for the $9 trial with different email addresses, it’s no wonder they did away with that option!
ERC-1155 support was apparently added in February.