“Whale” gets thrown around so loosely on Polymarket and Kalshi that it’s stopped meaning much. In our scoring, wallet pedigree is one of the five layers — and it isn’t about raw account size. It’s about what a wallet’s history says about the current trade.
The four archetypes
- Whale. A wallet whose positions are large enough to move the book on their own. Loud, but not automatically credible — a whale can be wrong in public like anyone.
- Category expert. A wallet with a demonstrable track record in one specific market category. The highest-value archetype: specialized, repeatable, and often right.
- New account. Recently created, likely with fresh funding. High-signal when it moves big and fast — that’s the tell of a funded, deliberate actor — but usually just noise.
- Fresh wallet. The key cluster signal: a batch of new accounts taking the same side of one market at once. Four fresh wallets on the same trade is rarely an accident.
Why it matters for the score
Pedigree doesn’t sit alone — it’s the lens the other layers are read through. A whale buying $44K is one story; a fresh wallet buying $44K minutes before a Fed statement is a completely different one, even though the dollars are identical. That’s why the score weighs them together instead of rewarding raw size. A known category expert adding quietly gets more credit than a stranger screaming into a market. Watch the archetypes show up in real flags on the signals page.