Recently, the market has warmed up, and various narratives are starting to fly around again. But today, I don't want to talk about the 'Alpha' that can make you 'rich overnight'; I want to discuss a more fundamental topic: In this increasingly 'dark forest' of the on-chain world, how can we survive and even thrive?
No suspense, today's protagonist is Bubblemaps.
I know that when people hear 'on-chain data tools', many might want to scroll away, thinking it's too far removed from us, something only 'scientists' play with. Frankly, I used to think that way too, until a few recent events completely changed my perspective.
My 'A-ha Moment': From 'watching the fun' to 'seeing the way'.
This summer (2025), everyone should still remember the hype in the AI sector and GameFi. At that time, several tokens had very strange price movements, often showing a large bullish candle at strange hours late at night, and by the time the community reacted, they had already surged seven or eight times. If you rushed in, you would start a long decline.
What we retail investors can see are the prices on CoinMarketCap and the FOMO sentiment in the community. But what’s beneath the surface?
I was also puzzled at the time, so I casually dropped the contract addresses of those tokens into Bubblemaps.
As a result, I saw a graph that sent a chill down my spine.
It’s neither a candlestick chart nor a complex data table, just a bunch of big and small 'bubbles'. Each bubble is a wallet, and the larger the bubble, the more holdings it has. If there has been a transfer between wallets, they will be connected by a line.
In those few skyrocketing token graphs, I clearly saw:
In the week or even half a month before a pump, dozens of seemingly unrelated wallets distributed startup funds from the same source and then, almost at the same time, dispersed to accumulate. These wallets are tightly connected in the graph, like a spider web.
And at the peak of the pump, several large bubbles in this 'web' simultaneously transferred funds to the Binance exchange recharge address.
The story that follows, everyone will understand.
Before Bubblemaps appeared, these operations were drowned in a sea of on-chain hash values, and we had no way of perceiving them. We were like sailing in thick fog, relying only on feelings and candlestick charts to guess. And Bubblemaps is the fan that disperses the fog in an instant. It transforms cold addresses into 'gang portraits' with relationships and behavioral patterns.
It’s not 'another' data tool, but a 'mindset upgrade'.
At this point, some might say that tools like Nansen and Arkham can also track the big whales. That's true, but they solve different problems.
Traditional on-chain tools are more like 'single point monitoring', telling you what a certain big player bought or sold. This is useful for tracking VCs or smart money.
But what Bubblemaps provides is a **'structured perspective'**. It doesn't answer 'who', but rather 'what relationships exist between them'.
This is especially important in the current market. Many project operators are becoming increasingly savvy; they don’t use a single large wallet to operate but rather use hundreds of 'sub wallets' to confuse you. If you only focus on one, you won't see the bigger picture at all.
The power of Bubblemaps lies in its ability to identify all these 'aliases' through the flow of funds, allowing you to see at a glance who is 'one of us'. This is an upgrade from 'point' monitoring to 'area' insight.
Why is it worth taking seriously now?
No matter how good a tool is, if it’s too niche, it’s just a toy for a few people.
What makes me believe Bubblemaps will become a trend is its ability to 'break the circle'. Now, if you go to platforms we use daily like Etherscan, BscScan, or DEX Screener, many have already integrated its plugins.
What does this mean? It means that 'seeing through the chip structure' is transitioning from a 'dragon-slaying skill' of a few to a 'common knowledge' that every ordinary investor can easily grasp. When a tool becomes infrastructure for the industry, if you don’t understand it, it's equivalent to actively giving up your information advantage.
Some immature thoughts I want to discuss with everyone
Talking about this, I don't want to 'promote' some wealth code; on the contrary, I want to provide a 'shield' that can protect us.
The world of Web3 is terrifyingly transparent and complex. As the sickle evolves, our understanding must keep up. The emergence of tools like Bubblemaps essentially levels the information gap between major institutions and us retail investors.
It can’t guarantee you will make money, but it can largely help you avoid becoming the one who gets 'precisely harvested'.
