Nansen

What it is

Nansen is a hosted on-chain dashboard whose product is not the data but the names attached to it. It resolves addresses to entities — a particular exchange's hot wallet, a fund, a public figure, one of its own "Smart Money" cohorts — and then builds every screen on that attribution: token screeners you can filter by who is buying, wallet profiles with PnL and counterparties, flow charts split by holder type rather than by size. The chain data underneath is the same public data everyone indexes. What is being sold is the labelling, and Nansen puts the count at 500 million labelled addresses.

Since 2026 it is also a place to trade. Spot swaps on Solana and Base route across Jupiter, OKX and LI.FI; perpetuals go to Hyperliquid; the wallet is non-custodial and built on Privy, so Nansen prepares an unsigned transaction and you sign it locally. An AI agent answers questions in plain language and can place those trades in the same conversation.

It is the wrong product for anyone who wants to ask their own question. There is no SQL surface and no notebook — you get Nansen's screens, Nansen's endpoints and Nansen's definition of a whale.

Pricing

Two plans. Free, and Pro at $69 a month billed monthly or $49 a month billed annually. Pro is what carries the labels: Nansen lists full PnL and labels including Smart Money, 2,000 AI agent prompts a month, unlimited portfolios and smart alerts, and a trading-fee discount. The free plan allows one active smart alert at a time.

The API is metered in credits rather than calls, and the spread between endpoints is wide enough that the two units are not interchangeable. Most Token God Mode and Profiler calls cost 1 credit; Smart Money endpoints cost 5; an address-labels lookup costs 100 for common labels and 500 for premium ones; an agent question costs 200 in fast mode and 750 in expert mode. Pro starts with 2,000 credits and is topped back up to 2,000 at the start of each month only if the balance has fallen below it — a floor, not a monthly grant. Free gets 100 credits once and then a daily top-up to 10. Purchased credits expire a year after purchase.

There is a second way to pay for the API that does not involve a subscription at all: pay per call, at $0.01 for basic endpoints and $0.05 for premium and Smart Money ones, with no API key at all. Two rails carry it at the same prices — x402, settled in USDC on Base, Solana or Monad, and MPP on Tempo — and the same endpoints accept both. The labels endpoints are the exception and are excluded from both: Nansen sells those on the Pro subscription only, so the thing the product is known for cannot be bought by the call. Rate-limited requests are not charged, and an API key, if you send one, takes precedence and bypasses the mechanism. Trading calls consume no credits.

Prices were read on 2026-09-19 from the credits guide in Nansen's developer documentation and the API landing page, which agree with each other and with Nansen's own help centre. The in-app plan comparison table — the page the vendor's own footer calls "Pricing" — sits behind a bot checkpoint that refuses automated clients, so the feature-by-feature grid has not been read.

Data & coverage

Nansen documents 38 chains, and says outright that chain support varies by endpoint: the labels endpoint accepts 20 of them. History is per chain and starts where Nansen onboarded it — Ethereum from 30 July 2015, Solana from 17 March 2020, Base from 15 June 2023, and recent additions from the day they arrived, Robinhood Chain from 30 April 2026 and Arc from 15 July 2026. Hyperliquid perpetuals are a separate dataset, reliable from May 2025. Polymarket prediction-market history runs from November 2022.

Live data is "seconds to a couple of minutes" behind the chain by Nansen's own description, and some endpoints serve current-day responses from a cache of up to five minutes. That is real time for a dashboard and is not real time for anything that trades on the difference.

Historical answers are not fixed. Nansen states that past windows may be revised for late-arriving data, data-quality corrections, historical-price fixes, token metadata changes, sector reclassification, blacklist updates and — the one that matters here — attribution and label-history updates. Re-running the same query over the same past week can return different numbers because the labels changed underneath it.

Integrations

A REST API keyed by an apikey header, a first-party MCP server with documented setups for Claude, Cursor, the ChatGPT plugin directory and Grok over OAuth, and a CLI installed as nansen-cli. There is no SDK; the developer FAQ answers that question with a flat "No".

Alerts fire on token transfers, Smart Money token flows and — through the API — calls to a named contract; the app adds a Hyperliquid perp-position alert. Delivery is to Telegram, Discord, Slack or an HTTPS endpoint of your own, the last with an optional shared secret that signs each payload with HMAC-SHA256. Email is not among the channels.

The trading endpoints follow a quote, prepare, execute shape for spot and cover the full position lifecycle for Hyperliquid perps, with keys never leaving your side; trading is unavailable from some jurisdictions, and wallet addresses are screened against sanctions lists before a quote is returned. A separate group of backtesting endpoints serves point-in-time historical screeners, holders, leaderboards and OHLCV — data to backtest against, not a backtester.

Limitations

The labels are undated and have no history. Nansen's own documentation is explicit: the address-labels endpoint returns the current set of labels, with no date-range parameter and no historical look-back. The label object carries a name, a category and a kind, and nothing else — so nothing in a response says when a label was applied or when it was last checked, and two answers a year apart are not distinguishable from one another. Labels do get withdrawn: "Former Smart Trader" is a published label for a wallet that no longer qualifies. What is not published is how often any of it is revisited — there is no review cadence for the label set anywhere in the documentation or the help centre, and the help-centre article on labels has not itself been updated in about a year. The only acknowledgement in the API docs that labels move at all is a line in the data coverage page listing "label-history updates" as one reason a historical result can change.

You are buying a judgement you cannot audit. The Smart Money cohorts are thresholds Nansen chose — minimum win rates, required ROI, realised-profit floors — over sets that are smaller than the marketing implies: on EVM chains, roughly 850 all-time smart traders, 600 at 180 days, 410 at 90 and 200 at 30. Whether a given wallet belongs there is not checkable from outside.

Most of what makes it worth buying cannot leave. Address labels, Smart Money holdings, DEX trades, DCAs and perp trades, and both PnL leaderboards are prohibited from redistribution under any circumstances. Smart-money-filtered holders and perp positions, and Smart Money inflows, require Nansen's approval plus demonstrated "significant data transformation". If the plan is to resell or publish a view built on Nansen attribution, read that page before the pricing one.

The free plan cannot do the thing the product is for. Ten credits a day against a 100-credit common-labels call means the free tier's 100 opening credits buy exactly one labels lookup, and after that the daily refill never reaches the price of another.

No query surface. No SQL, no user-defined metrics, no notebook. Every number is one Nansen decided to compute, defined the way Nansen defines it.

Alternatives

Arkham is the direct competitor: a free platform account against this card's free plan, an Intel API at 100 dollars a month against pay-per-call here, and labels that at least carry a confidence grade where these carry no dates and no history. Both are the same purchase in the end — an attribution you cannot audit.

Bubblemaps answers a narrower question with a checkable artefact: which wallets moved funds to each other, drawn as a graph, with the transfers themselves verifiable on a block explorer.

If the label is the part you do not want to buy on trust, Dune, Allium and Bitquery sell the indexed rows and leave the naming to you — which is more work, and the only version where the answer is yours to defend.