115,006 Large-Trade Alerts in 78 Days: Where Crypto Whales Actually Print

The Vultax whale tracker watches exchange trade feeds and raises an alert when a print is large for its pair and venue. Every alert is stored with the exchange, pair, side, price, quantity and notional at the moment it fired. This article reports that log, unfiltered, for the 78 days from 18 June to 3 September 2026: 115,006 alerts from six exchanges, on 60 days with data. The 18 days without data are collection gaps and are reported as gaps rather than filled.

Three detectors contribute. A single large trade fires when one print clears the notional threshold for its pair, which sat at roughly $29,000 at the low end during this window. A burst fires when several large trades land inside a 45-second window. A momentum alert fires on three or more consecutive large trades on the same side. One trade can trigger more than one detector, so alerts outnumber trades: 59,803 of the alerts are single large trades, 34,948 are bursts, and 20,255 are momentum alerts.

• Venues — Binance, HTX, Coinbase, Gate.io, Kraken and KuCoin, the six where the trade feed was complete enough to run detection
• Pairs — BTC accounts for 81% of alerts (BTC/USDT and BTC-USD together), ETH/USDT for 12%, SOL for 5.5%
• Notional — every figure is the print's own price times quantity; alerts that share a trade are double-counted in the $11.38B all-alert total, so venue comparisons below use single large trades only

Counting single large trades only, Binance produced the most prints and HTX produced the most money. Binance logged 20,022 large trades worth $1.10B, with a median print of $43,000 and a 90th percentile of $84,000. HTX logged 19,617 large trades worth $2.88B, with a median of $65,000 and a 90th percentile of $364,000, more than four times Binance's. Coinbase followed with 11,294 prints and $0.68B, then Gate.io with 5,480 and $0.30B, Kraken with 1,804 and $0.09B, and KuCoin with 1,586 and $0.08B.

Put differently, HTX accounted for a third of the large trades in the sample and 56% of the large-trade notional. The gap widened over the summer: HTX large-trade notional went from $0.58B in June to $0.84B in July and $1.39B in August, while Binance went from $0.24B to $0.38B to $0.44B.

A large print is not, by itself, evidence of genuine demand. The academic literature on crypto volume, summarised in our wash-trading study, finds that reported activity on some venues is dominated by trades with no economic purpose, and a venue where prints are structurally larger deserves the same question. That is why the terminal shows a venue-quality score next to every print instead of ranking venues by size. Nothing here is a claim about why HTX prints are larger; it is a measurement of the fact that they are.

• HTX — 19,617 large trades, median $65K, p90 $364K, $2.88B (56% of large-trade notional)
• Binance — 20,022 large trades, median $43K, p90 $84K, $1.10B
• Coinbase — 11,294 large trades, median $46K, p90 $86K, $0.68B
• Gate.io — 5,480 large trades, median $44K, p90 $92K, $0.30B
• Kraken — 1,804 large trades, median $46K, p90 $73K, $0.09B
• KuCoin — 1,586 large trades, median $39K, p90 $74K, $0.08B

Most alerts are not enormous. 91,246 of the 115,006 (79%) were under $100,000. Another 15,572 fell between $100,000 and $250,000, 5,098 between $250,000 and $500,000, and 2,482 between $500,000 and $1M. Only 604 alerts were between $1M and $5M, and four exceeded $5M. Those 608 prints above $1M carried $0.94B, about 8% of all alert notional, from half a percent of the alerts.

The five largest prints in the window were a $7.06M BTC-USD sell on Coinbase on 27 June, a $5.45M ETH/USDT sell on HTX on 19 August, a $5.26M BTC/USDT sell on HTX on 13 July, a $4.69M BTC-USD buy on Coinbase on 20 August, and a $4.24M BTC-USD sell on Coinbase on 27 June. Four of the five were sells.

51.1% of all alerts were buys. No venue strayed far from that: KuCoin was lowest at 47.5% buys and HTX highest at 52.6%. Across the last three weeks of the window the daily buy share ranged from 49.4% to 56.5%. At the level of raw counts, large flow was near-balanced on most days.

What separates a day is not the count of large prints but how they cluster. The burst detector fired 34,948 times and the momentum detector 20,255 times, and those clusters, not isolated prints, are what the whale-tracking workflow treats as a read on intent. A single $400,000 buy is a data point. Six of them inside a minute on two venues is a position being built.

For scale, a 25% sample of every BTC trade on Binance and Coinbase over the 24 hours to 3 September 2026 puts the median Binance BTC/USDT print at five dollars, the 90th percentile at $383 and the 99th at $6,575. On Coinbase the median was $25, the 90th percentile $1,699 and the 99th $11,413. Trades of $100,000 or more made up 4.4% of sampled notional on Binance and 2.8% on Coinbase.

A $50,000 alert therefore sits more than 100 times above the median Binance trade and around the 99.5th percentile of the tape. Whale alerts are, by construction, the far tail, which is why a handful of them carries so much of the notional.

Alerts count detector events, not unique trades, and thresholds differ by pair and venue, so a venue with more small pairs under coverage will show more alerts per dollar. Detection ran on six venues where the trade feed was complete; the terminal covers more venues for order books than for trades. Eighteen of the 78 days have no data and are excluded rather than interpolated. All notional is measured at the print price and is not adjusted for the same capital cycling through a venue. The raw alert log is retained, so every figure here can be recomputed.

• Window — 2026-06-18 to 2026-09-03 00:26 UTC, 60 days with data
• Threshold — pair- and venue-specific; the smallest alert in the window was about $29,000
• Dataset — daily alerts, large trades, bursts, momentum alerts, buy share and notional by exchange are available as a CSV on this page