How Nansen’s New Trading Agent Makes It Easier to Follow the Smart Money Onchain

The last month after we launched our beta, I've been trading more than I've ever traded in terms of just activity. And I think it's reflective of that process being lubricated by AI because it's just so simple for me to just say, "Hey, act on this now."

Hey everyone, welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed in the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchainedcrypto.com.

Before we start, I wanted to introduce you all to our sponsor, Walrus, a project we actually use here at Unchained for data storage. Throughout the episode, you'll hear short excerpts from Rebecca Simons, managing executive at the Walrus Foundation. We'll start with this clip on why Walrus is good for large data files.

If you look at most apps today, they depend on quite a complex mesh of different infrastructure, a lot of which is centralized. Walrus is a decentralized data platform. It's particularly good with large unstructured data files and it allows you to store and use those without dependency on any centralized systems. It works really well as part of the stack.

It was created by Miston Labs who are also the originators of that Swiss stack. And what that means is natively together they allow developers to build with trust, ownership, privacy baked in right from the beginning. And what this does is it allows you to build use cases that monetize data in ways that just have not been possible before. So there are whole new revenue streams that are now available to builders to come and build on Morris.

Today's guest is Alex Vanovvic, co-founder and CEO Nansen. Welcome, Alex.

Thank you, Laura. Good to be here. I'm a big fan of your work.

Yeah, nice to chat with you. I'm just realizing I don't think I've ever had you on the show, which is crazy. But we have a really great opportunity to chat with you, which is that Nansen has big news coming out today. You're launching a new AI trading agent. Explain what it does.

Yes. So, some people might know Nansen for the work we've done over the years on onchain analytics. So basically a lot of investors and traders use our product to discover tokens, perform due diligence on them, but then at the end of the day they historically have gone to another product to actually execute the trade.

And so what we've done is that we've basically taken this function inhouse, which means that you can do your whole onchain investing and trading within the same product discovery, research, and then ultimately execution in one product. And the thing that's kind of unique is that we offer an agentic way to do this.

So, you know, we thought, what does investing look like in 2030? And instead of trying to build kind of yet another trading product that looks like all the other ones, you can basically talk to Nansen and you can say, "Hey, I want to know what Smart Money is doing." You can get the tokens that they've been buying over the last hour or 24 hours or any time frame you want because all the data is in real time.

And then you can say, "Hey, this number two on that list looks interesting. Why don't we put, you know, $100 into that?" And then the agent literally based on what you said goes out, checks multiple DEX aggregators and gives you the best price and then you can tap execute and the execution app is on chain. So, it's a pretty magical user experience in my humble opinion and the thinking is that we're basically creating a new way to trade that's agentic onchain and integrated in one product.

Amazing. So what are like what give me kind of the range of things that we could ask it to do?

Oh yeah, that's a good question. So in the beginning we're trying to focus on kind of the co-pilot user experience where you basically just use it as almost either co-pilot or a concierge to execute the the trade. But over time you're going to be able to do more interesting things like prompting a strategy or you know asking it to rebalance your portfolio.

Actually it can kind of do that now. I was demoing it last night at an event to someone where I said, "Hey, just rebalance my portfolio, like pretty open-ended. It doesn't really know how to rebalance it." It gave me like five different options. And then I said, "Okay, number two looks good." Which was to sell off some of the smaller positions I had.

And it basically triggered five different transactions for me. And then I just manually clicked execute on each one of them, which basically streamlines the whole process. So, so that's what you can do today. We're trying to keep it relatively simple in the beginning because you want to make sure that the agent doesn't hallucinate.

It has really great execution. It doesn't get confused. So, that's why we want to really nail that first user use case where you just ask it to do kind of simple transactions. You can do a little bit more than that, but the thinking is to kind of open Pandora's box and start trading through the agent rather than kind of a conventional graphical user interface.

Okay. Yeah. I mean what's interesting is you know in a lot of wallets there will be a sort of aggregator aspect and it'll show like it's giving you the best rate or you know whatever but you know like that like a lot of people understand oh actually but if I use this other website I you know I can I can access the wallet but use a different interface and get an even better rate. So it's almost like you're using this AI agent to just do something that like you would do manually.

Yeah. So this this is a really good point actually because I think a lot of people will basically assume oh you know Nansen is charging some massive fee on top of you know what you would otherwise get if you went straight to something like Jupiter or whatnot. But what we're doing is actually charging you the same or even lower fees.

And so it's basically 10 basis points if you're a pro subscriber, which is super low,.1% in fees, or 25 basis points if you are a free user. And so this has been in beta now for pro users for about a month. And now it's launching for free users, which means you're paying 25 basis points.

And if you compare that with centralized exchanges or you compare it with other DEX products, it's either the same or better. In other words, we're actually not marking up at all the price that you'd get through the aggregator. So, the thinking is like if you're already using Nansen to discover what you should do, we just want to make it really convenient for you to do it right in our interface and if we had a big fee on top of it, that would basically maybe drive you to go somewhere else to do it instead.

But the thinking is let's just have the same or even lower fees right in our user interface. So yeah, our users by the way are probably a little bit more sophisticated than the average investor because we of course have a lot of data and analytics and so people who use our product tend to kind of want to dig a little bit deeper and so I don't think they would accept actually if we had kind of a you know 95 basis point fee or some something crazy like that which actually by the way a lot of other products do charge people even if you might not be aware.

So yeah, that's kind of the thinking that you get the best price and you also get super low fees, which means why wouldn't you just execute the transaction in our product and so it sounds like originally the thinking is this will be used for DeFi and then there's this manual component where you're kind of approving what it does but what's your vision for kind of like the next level you know type of activity and frankly you know just hear like hearing AI agent to me was like eventually it'll get to the point where AI agents are transacting with each other but yeah I don't know just tell me kind of what you think the evolution of the product will be.

Yeah totally by the way so in addition to the agentic way to trade you can also trade through a more conventional kind of trading terminal UI on web. So I think we acknowledge that a lot of people will still prefer to trade the old way but over time more and more people are going to get comfortable trading the new way.

And so I think this is similar with like chatbt for example. Although it was so incredibly powerful when it launched, it took a while for people to get used to the thought that you can actually do a lot through a chat UI, right? And I think at this point if you use something like Claude, you know you're kind of amazed at least I am like regularly literally every day on how much it can do.

So I think it's somewhat similar with trading except we haven't been used to trading that way. And so I think we first have to just like crack that open and get people to get used to the idea that you can just log in and send a message to your agent and the agent does what you want.

And so for me, like as a user of our own product, this has been pretty interesting to get used to that behavioral loop where now for me, the most natural thing is to go into our mobile app, send a message to the agent, and it does what I want. Like, hey, sell all the meme coins I have in my portfolio, and it just like does that for me.

And so I think that's where it starts. But I think the longer term vision to your point is basically that a lot of agents can do things autonomously, right? And then there's kind of a way to get there. I think humans will always want to be in the loop to some extent although there there might be different, you know, personas.

I think some people actually enjoy trading from an entertainment point of view and they will not want to be taken out of the loop. So the kind of co-pilot user experience is really good for them. Other people frankly are like look I don't care you know what this thing does. I just want to put in some money and then I expect that it sort of manages the money.

I say managing in a loose sense. And so maybe this is where like you probably have friends and family over the years who have been like hey I want to put some money into crypto. What should I buy? Right? And and so for now, most people, and I have a lot of friends and family in that category, most people would just say like, "Hey, just buy Bitcoin or, you know, just don't buy anything because you're, you know, you're likely going to buy the wrong thing or or whatnot."

But most people don't want to manage money on behalf of their friends. So there is clearly like a need for more passive investment that is also maybe more than just buying Bitcoin. And so I think agents could play an interesting role in that sense where you just like you would talk to a friend who has like infinite patience and you know is glued to the screen 24/7 you might want to express hey this is what I want like this is sort of the the guard rails of what I want and this is what I expect just like you would talk to again chat code and so on to solve other problems and then you kind of expect that it does stuff under the hood.

So my my view is like it'll it'll be kind of a I think we'll take steps towards that vision. Number one, like it's not going to automatically switch overnight where everyone just says these agents are going to trade autonomously. But I think also number two, these user experiences that we'll get I think this year will maybe be more appealing to other people than the people who are trading in crypto today.

So if you're super deep in the trenches and you are, you know, buying memecoins left and right and you're glued to the screen, maybe like a different user persona will find more value in an agentic user interface. So yeah, it's a super interesting area and we're kind of figuring this out as we go and like because all of the stuff that's happening in AI it feels like the world is changing literally like at least every week, you know, if not every day.

But yeah, the overall it's kind of like going from co-pilot to like autonomous self-driving and then there's kind of a big space in between those two things and lots of different variations that are going to be appealing to lots of different user personas.

And so Nansen itself covers many chains and I was wondering does this agent work on all the chains you guys cover or is it only you know EVM chains or Yeah, explain that part.

Yeah, for now it's Solana and Base, but it will launch pretty much all the chains that we that where users expect to trade. So, we're going to roll road roll gradually because it's kind of think of it like this, like before you switch on a chain, you need to make sure that you have everything lined up like everything needs to be super reliable in terms of the information, the data.

You need to make sure that you have super high swap success rate that like every transaction that the user tries to make actually lands and there are a lot of moving parts there. So we'll basically gradually be adding more chains to it. And it's kind of funny because the agent almost creates what you can think of as like chain abstraction, right?

Because if you just tell the agent what you want to do and the agent knows where you have funds like which portfolio and it can bridge it can just take care of stuff for you under the hood instead of this like frankly terrible user experience which I think I should have mentioned early on. We should acknowledge that the user experience of trading on chain is pretty garbage right that is kind of the nature of early stage crypto if we can call it that.

Like the infrastructure hasn't really been there. We don't have that many products. People often build only for degens and so you know we're we're kind of we're used to a bad user experience. Hence the bar has been pretty low. And so what we're trying to do is to raise the bar on the user experience, which means that a lot of the stuff that's typically annoying with onchain trading just goes away because you've abstracted the chain or because you don't have to go to separate app to sign like a different wallet app or you'd have to have like 17 different tabs open just to like monitor the information whether it's onchain or X or whatever.

So all like a lot of these problems go away because we've tried to build a really integrated user experience where you just literally download the mobile app and you can start talking to the agent and it guides you through the process. You send in, you know, $10 to test it out and now you have an agent that you can just talk to and trade with.

So yeah, the user experience is pretty terrible in crypto, right? and we have a long way to to go there, but now I think the infrastructure is good enough to build really worldclass products and user experiences. So that's what at least what we're trying to do.

All right, so in a moment we're going to learn more about the types of customers that will use it and how this could impact the the market structure of crypto. But first, we'll take another quick word from Rebecca Simons, managing executive at the Walmer Foundation on why Walrus works for devs.

Before we built Walrus, what we heard a lot from developers was the need for speed and we act we had it ourselves. So reads and rights are extremely fast on Walrus and this means that apps don't lag even with really large files. Privacy was another thing that we heard a lot about and Walrus lets developers encrypt data with our primitive called seal and with that you have full control over who access your data and everything is enforced on chain and this enables these really incredible use cases that haven't been possible before.

Everything from more reliable AI models to data markets where users can monetize their data. So if you put this all together, what this actually means is the developers can finally build apps and they feel web too fast, but you've got web three level guarantees.

So, you know, you kind of talked a little bit before about how you thought your users were more sophisticated and I wondered if you could kind of elaborate on, you know, are they kind of institutional traders or, you know, what types of activity do you see with your products and what types of activity do you expect with this product?

Yeah, I always found it funny because many people think that Nansen is kind of an institutional product first and foremost, but actually most of our users are on investors who are individuals and they're in the trenches. And so typically so the way I would think of it is kind of on the one hand you have sort of normies who just bought Bitcoin on Coinbase for the first time ever. that's not typically our core persona.

And on the other hand, you have extremely kind of advanced let's say market makers funds who require everything to be programmatic and and so on and so forth. We do have some of them using or actually a lot of them use our APIs but I think the core user we've always focused on is kind of the DGEN the individual investor who feels that they can have an edge in crypto because frankly they can crypto is super fragmented and there's a lot of information inefficiencies and they tend to kind of look at new narratives and try to figure out what's actually, you know, the best way to play this latest narrative or to manage, you know, their overall more long-term onchain portfolio.

But people who trade on chain very actively is kind of the core user persona and, you know, most people refer to them as degens, that is basically like the core user persona we've always catered to at Nansen. I can also just say for those people who aren't familiar with with Nansen, the way we got started was that we launched our product April 2020 right before something called DeFi summer.

And so and so DeFi summer was an amazing time. Probably not for our physical health because we were stuck inside due to COVID and kind of doing lots all sorts of crazy things on chain. But there was like a very clear need to figure out what people are doing on chain because there were so many opportunities all the time and you had to navigate what the quote unquote smart money was doing on chain at the time.

Smart money meant funds like Alama and Three Arrows Capital which turned out to not be so smart after all. But at least a lot of people wanted to figure out what are these what are these funds doing on chain and we basically label addresses that is one of our core strengths. So we have like 500 million addresses labeled which is done mostly you know algorithmically and through AI agents actually and some human curation as well.

But so you can figure out what smart money is doing. That was like the inception of the company and how we got started. And so we've sort of evolved that approach, but the core thing has always been the same, which is that we want to surface the signal and create winners. That's the mission of the company.

And in a way, even if crypto changes, that part has always been true. That's kind of an evergreen truth of the company that there are opportunities on chain. If you're smart and if you look at the right things and if you actually make use of the information of what's happening on chain, you can have an edge. Like that's the whole kind of founding premise of the company. So, so that's why we've always been, you know, used a lot by by the degens.

All right. Well, so I'm glad that you dipped into Nansen history because yeah, we have not had that information on the show. I'm also curious about your history. How did you get into crypto and come to found Nansen?

Yeah, so my own background is actually in AI. I have a master's degree in AI from University of Edinburgh back in 2010, so 15 years ago, which means I like to say that I was an AI before it was cool. And it's true and I can prove it. But yeah so I worked as a data scientist actually for many years and I worked with machine learning I trained models funnily enough one of one of my teammates back in I guess 2016 was Mutz who is the CTO at Dune Analytics and so so we worked together yeah he's a great guy and they've done super well over the years which I'm very happy about and so I was a data scientist for many years as a data science manager I worked as a management consultant even like in industries like insurance and salmon farming and media and lots of different industries.

And then in 2017 I discovered Ethereum. Some engineers at our company in Barcelona at the time basically taught me about Ethereum and I got very curious on it because I had ignored Bitcoin for many years before that you know which is not great in hindsight but I was kind of thinking as a as most other boomers that Bitcoin was for moneyaundering and and nothing else.

And then a few years later, I discovered Ethereum and I thought this is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, I like that it's a platform because that means people can create things on the platform and if any of those things become popular, probably the platform is going to acrue some kind of value. That's number one.

Number two is that with Bitcoin, I always felt that I don't know if this is the currency that's going to take off. Even if the thesis is correct, you don't know if that's the right currency, the right implementation of it or whatever, the right monetary policy and all that stuff. So, I thought if someone does figure that out, there's a good chance they will build that currency on Ethereum.

So I think a lot of people had sort of similar thoughts on Ethereum and maybe add to that that this was right at the ICO boom which created also a lot of opportunities to invest and make money pretty fast and also lose money pretty fast. So so I kind of dove right into that. I moved to Hong Kong in early 2018.

I joined actually another startup that had done an ICO. that startup imploded very quickly because the price of ETH tanked from $1,400 to $80 in 2018 and after that I realized that the core thing to focus on was onchain data and onchain analytics and so I took some of the best people from that company and co-founded Nansen started building it late 2019 and then we went ICO that was yeah it was called coinfi it was kind of one of a million ICOs, you know, never went anywhere.

But I I will say like some of the I think like there was a premise of kind of trying to build great a great information tool for crypto, but the vision wasn't very clear. And so as an employee and not a co-founder at at that company, you know, I I tried to speak up and say, "Hey, this is what we should do." You know, it wasn't wellreceived. So I thought, well, I'll start start my own company and then do these things myself. And it turned out that maybe I was right.

So, we touched a little bit on on some of this before, but I wanted to tease out more of this information about your new AI agent product. Um, by the way, does it have a name?

Yeah, so the mobile app is just Nansen AI and so that's that's pretty straightforward. And on web where it's launching very very soon it's the same AI agent which means it has the same capabilities but for now it is just integrated into our web product you know which you can find at Nansen.ai AI. So it doesn't have a separate name as such. It's kind of evolving our core product to become AI first.

Okay. So you know what this type of product does is it gives retail users access to the or at least similar types of automated decision making systems that hedge funds have. And I wondered how you thought that would impact market structure.

That's a great question and yeah, I do think this is kind of giving retail investors an iron man suit, which is kind of the ambition, right? Or a batmobile, you know, choose your choose your metaphor. But I I do think it's interesting because my view is that AI the benefits of AI are going to acrue to individual investors more.

And so if I kind of unpack that a little bit, I would say if you think of a hedge fund that h that is very well resourced, they have, you know, PhDs, analysts, traders, all these different types of profiles and they've invested a lot in their infrastructure, but the cost to recreate or even create new infrastructure and products, tools, that are equally good or even better has basically collapsed with AI.

And so my view is actually that the greatest improvement will be for in individual investors and so that's pretty interesting and it is it is a really good question on like how it impacts market structure. I think the good thing about crypto is that crypto is so fragmented that this has always been kind of my thesis about crypto is that there's so much stuff happening in crypto and it's so fragmented that everyone can have alpha in their little corner and so you know you and I might have the same tools but we can use those tools very differently and we can focus the tools on very different portions of the market.

And So what I think seems pretty obvious is that just activity is going to go up like if you can more easily do things on chain which is not just because of AI but also because the infrastructure is so great you know because you have Solana that has super low fees super low latency you have like privy dynamic turnkey which gives you great like embedded wallet technology you have you know aggregators like LiFi OKX DEX and Jupiter that give you great like best price execution like all this infrastructure is now there.

And then you add on top of that AI to help you you know discover and research and ultimately also execute trades. It just seems to me that you know that is an incredible setup for ini individual investors and it's going to make them trade even more. And so so I think like it's pretty seems pretty obvious that activity is going to go up.

It's a little bit like vibe coding right where you know more people are going to code because of vibe coding because you have like lowered the threshold for people to code stuff. And so I think vibe trading which is one way to think about agentic trading which is what we offer also kind of lowers the threshold to like who can trade and then it's really important by the way that the tools you give them actually are good right because if you lower the threshold and you give someone it's kind of have you seen the meme with u giving like cloud code for marketers it's like someone handing an Uzi to a chimp That's that's that's like that's like one that's one potential way to think about this, right?

Which could be very dangerous, right? And like you need to make sure that the quality is great. And to be honest, you know, because we operate in the agentic trading category, I've looked at other products and like I'm not going to mention any names, but there's a lot of slop out there and I think a lot of people, frankly, are going to lose money because they're going to use tools that are, you know, halfbaked that don't really work and they kind of look good, but under the hood, the agent is like hallucinating, has the wrong data, it picks the wrong token if you want to execute it. like there's all sorts of things that can go wrong.

So I think like yeah how it impacts market structure I think a it's going to increase just activity like it it makes it possible for more people to trade number one and number two it lubricates the whole trading process which means like the people who do trade are going to trade more like for example I actually don't trade that much you know I think of myself more as maybe operating the equivalent of like a you know liquid token sort of venture fund kind of defines capital run by Arthur is a friend of mine and and that kind of style where you don't necessarily trade super frequently but you have like a bet and you want to see that bet play out could take months could take years whatever but in the last month after we launched our beta I've been trading more than I've ever traded in terms of just activity and I think it it's reflective of that like process being lubricated by AI because it's just so simple for me to just say, "Hey, act on this now."

And I don't have to be like, "Oh, let me open this page up. Go in there. Click on that tab. Now I have to sign with my other wallet. Oh, no. I don't have this wallet on my device. Oh, I have to scan this QR code." It's it's super clunky, right? And if you just have an incredibly lubricated process, a lot of which is done by AI, then I think people are just going to trade more.

So that's kind of and then I think you know you can then work backwards from like which assets are compelling to individual investors. Those assets are not are not the same necessarily as like institution investors. For example, memecoins and creator coins and you know even NFTs are typical kind of individual investor types of asset classes if we can call them that.

So, and then tokenized stocks too, I think is one of the most obvious bets ever that of course people are going to trade stocks on chain if if and that's a big if the user experience is better than trading it on the venues where you would trade stocks normally which I think it you know it will be and you might argue it's better already now but like it definitely will be very soon and then you have like prediction markets as well which appeal to individual investors retail investors and so you know all of these things are just going to have more and more activity is my view over the next years and so yeah that's kind and then you you're going to have like the cool thing about crypto going back to the part about fragmentation is that you have this long tale of assets and because you have so many market participants because we've lowered the threshold you're going to see so many you're going to see like a junk jungle like a camber explosion of all sorts of different tokens which you you know you could argue already seen to some extent.

I saw a funny tweet by Coin Gecko the other day which was like the number of failed tokens per year. Yeah. And it's gone exponential which kind of shows that you know failed tokens have pro product market fit. But yeah anyway so I think I think like those are some high level thoughts on how it impacts market structure.

I think it's like it's worth thinking through these things from first principles because like we're in a new world now and you might have to re-underwrite a lot of your mental models like in the next weeks and months partially because of AI.

Yeah. And you alluded to this. So out of curiosity um you know you're starting on Base and Solana but eventually um will this product also work on the various perexes you know hyperlquids a really popular one and and on prediction markets which is another hot area.

The short answer is yes like we will we our vision is to allow people to trade everything on chain with AI and when I say everything I mean everything. So if people want to trade on pation markets, if people want to trade on pers and if they want to trade meme coins, NFTTS, we will let them trade that.

Now there are some regulatory concerns you have to keep in mind as well and so we have to navigate that but that is the overall guiding principle that every asset will be tokenized which means billions of people are going to become owners and chains are going to become the new financial fabric of the world. And so this opportunity we have in front of us, which is to allow for people to trade everything on chain with AI, is like in my opinion one of the biggest opportunities in technology history ever.

And so yeah, we're going to support every chain that users want. We're going to support every asset that people want to trade and our ambition is to be their preferred onchain trading venue.

Yeah. what you said about how you expect this will just create so much more trading activity, you know, for me because I don't trade very much. I was like, "Oh, yeah, hell yeah. I would use it." And the other thing that was funny is um you know, you were talking about your history like 2017 and stuff and I wrote this article, I think it was in 2017 where there was this guy who was trading on um Kraken and I think it was um futures or something. I don't I don't remember exactly, but point is that he turned $10,000 into $7 million riding that whole initial um ICO wave, like the first like the early part of it up until I think it was like May or June of that year with the um the token summit that William Mugayar put on in New York and and that like caused like a a a you know a top in the price of ETH.

And the way he did it was he kind of didn't really leave his home very much. Like he might leave it occasionally, but he would like just wake up and be glued to his screens and he kind of had this whole system going, but he had to physically be there to execute all the trades, right? And so yeah, I just while you were describing all that, I remembered that guy and yeah, he said, "Oh, I you know, literally would just run to the store and get a sandwich, but otherwise I just was in my bedroom for, you know, seven months straight or whatever."

And um yeah, I was like, "Oh, well, I could spin up, you know, my little an Nansen AI trading bot and have it do that for me without having to be a hermit."

I mean, by the way, I have a lot of those stories. Like I had there was a girl in Mexico who said I think it was her and her friend started with $500 and they grew that portfolio to $2 million trading meme coins with Nansen. So again, just to be extremely clear, I don't think most people should expect to be able to pull that off, right? And you can also lose all your money when you trade crypto. Just to be extremely clear.

But you do have those stories. And I think one thing that's interesting that you said there is like he was glued to a screen. I actually think one of the biggest opportunities not just for crypto but for like software in general is to liberate people from their screens. And we talk a lot about a new way to trade. I also think there's kind of a another related concept