Nansen launched in 2020 as the first platform to systematically label Ethereum wallets. Founded by Alex Svanevik, a Norwegian data scientist based in Singapore, Nansen built a database of more than 300 million addresses tagged with identifiable behavior: “smart money,” “MEV bot,” “airdrop hunter,” “CEX hot wallet,” “whale.” Traders could filter token flows by label and see what the most profitable wallets were doing in near-real-time.
Nansen’s “Smart Money” label became the most-cited metric in onchain analytics. A token that started showing up in Smart Money inflows would get attention fast. Entire trading strategies formed around simply copying what labeled smart wallets were doing. Paid Nansen subscriptions — which started around $150/month and went up to thousands — became a standard expense for professional crypto funds.
Nansen expanded to Solana in 2023, Base in 2024, and built its own chain-agnostic dashboards for cross-chain flow tracking. Through the 2022 bear market, Nansen kept shipping while most competitors cut back. By 2024 it was the dominant enterprise onchain analytics platform, used by major exchanges, trading firms, and journalists. Svanevik became a frequently-quoted voice on onchain activity in mainstream crypto media.
Nansen’s contribution to the industry is that it made onchain data legible at scale. Before Nansen, analyzing onchain flows required writing custom queries against raw node data — a skill almost nobody outside protocol engineering had. After Nansen, a retail trader with a subscription could see almost everything. It was Bloomberg for the blockchain, and it became the template that every subsequent onchain analytics company tried to copy.
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