Exclusive: Nansen launches new crypto trading chatbot
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Blockchain data firm Nansen Thursday launched a chatbot trained on its database of top traders across more than two dozen public blockchains.
Why it matters: It's a new way to sort out profitable trades with a tool that sifts through an enormous trove of crypto data.
What we're watching: Nansen will eventually let users turn their money over to bots to let the AI trade for them. It's already testing trading agents internally.
- A trader could give a bot orders to trade on the volatility of a token, telling it to buy, for example, ether (ETH) every time it drops 2%. And then sell when it's up 4%. Then repeat.
- The agent could do this 24/7, and the owner would never even need to look.
- The company aims to release the product by year's end but is still testing for safety, such as making sure bots stick to guidelines and don't trade on hallucinated facts.
Fun fact: Nansen is dropping its prices as this offering goes live. The lowest monthly price is going from $99 now to $69 starting today.
- "It's quite the shift," Logan Brinkley, head of product UX and design at Nansen AI, told Axios. "Basically trying to make everything more accessible."
How it works: Blockchains are public, which allows a company like Nansen to keep an eye on the trading and success of different accounts. Since launching in 2020, Nansen has tracked the smartest money and the biggest wallets, allowing other traders to use the moves of the best informed investors to inform their own trades.
- "To some degree, you have to be very knowledgeable in the space itself already" to make sense of all that information, Brinkley said.
- The chatbot acts as an expert that can discuss trading ideas and also explain its reasoning.
- "It's a research team in your pocket," Brinkley said.
It's also reading about crypto on X, so you don't have to.
We tried out the system, which the company is calling Nansen AI, live on a call to Brinkley, who told it he had some Solana (SOL) and we wanted to grow those holdings of the token over the next six months.
- The chatbot suggested devoting 50% to simply staking SOL, which essentially generates a guaranteed return in the asset of around 6%.
- Then it suggested setting aside 30% for trading the highest volume tokens (with some suggestions) and 20% for buying new tokens, which the chatbot can help identify over time.
- Finally, it suggested risk management strategies such as closing out trades at 5 to 10% in losses and taking profits between 20 to 30% in gains.
Yes, but: Like all chatbots, Nansen's can hallucinate. Brinkley cautions users to confirm what the bot tells them.
Zoom out: Nansen isn't the only company piping its data into an LLM.
- For example, the world's largest exchange, Binance, has a bot available on the chat app Telegram and another data firm, Messari, has a bot called Copilot available to its paid users.
What's inside: Right now, Nansen's chatbot is running Anthropic's Claude under the hood, but the team continues to research which overall model works best.
They've also been testing their bot against general LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok and found that the Nansen bot works better because it was trained on specialized knowledge for trading.
- Nansen's bot can answer in either fast mode, for quick responses, or expert mode, for detailed reasoning.
- The bot continuously updates its information about the market based on Nansen's data and customizes responses based on the user's own portfolio.
- Brinkley compared it to building a brain just for your trading goals. "And the more knowledgeable and trustworthy that brain is," Brinkley said, "the better results you'll have."
What they're saying: "In a few years, this agentic experience will feel as natural as mobile banking is today," Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, said in a statement.
