The Algorand Whale Wallet is Upbit
In this document, I propose two things:
- The “TIPER ring” network is operated by Upbit, South Korea’s largest crypto exchange.
- The Whale wallet is part of the TIPER ring.
And thus: the whale wallet is controlled by Upbit.
1. The TIPER Ring is Upbit
The “TIPER ring” is a set of 11 accounts that form the core of a network that feeds the whale wallet and outflows to external exchanges / wallets. It is named after the address of its original account. This group of accounts was discussed by cryptofarmer1020 on Reddit. See “General Network Structure” below for a proposed diagram.
Between 9/1/2020 and 3/22/2022, it appears that the TIPER ring network/exchange allowed users to attach on-chain text notes to withdrawal transactions.
I looked at the notes field for all transactions sent from the 11 TIPER ring accounts. In this period, 2727 notes were created, the vast majority in Korean. Because there is personal identifying information like names and email addresses in the full spreadsheet, I am providing a sampling of the notes to give you an idea of what they look like.
The spreadsheet linked below shows some of the most relevant ones in full detail:
As can be seen, these notes indicate that the originator was sending from Upbit: “Upbit withdrawal”, “upbit-binance”, “upbit to coinlist”, “From upbit”, etc. You can see these notes in algoexplorer and algoscan using the transaction ID. For each of these transactions, I verified that the destination account was as advertised - that is, if the note said “upbit to binance”, the destination was indeed a binance deposit account.
In the full set of 2727 notes: in notes where only a single exchange is listed (eg., simply “Binance” or “MEXC” in the sample spreadsheet above), the destination account is always a deposit wallet for that exchange. Furthermore, there are no notes that indicate that the origin is any exchange other than Upbit (eg. no notes like “from binance”).
A supporting fact is that Upbit published the following notice on September 9, 2020, announcing that it had just listed Algorand. This is only nine days after the OG whale wallet and first TIPER account were created at Upbit. [ see footnote at bottom re Upbit’s ALGO listing date ]
https://upbit.medium.com/upbit-notes-new-listing-update-f99b9768bcf9
2. The Whale wallet is part of the TIPER Ring network
The Whale Wallet (N2C3) and its predecessor (7BZE, which I call the “OG whale wallet”) are highly integrated with the TIPER ring. In fact, the OG whale wallet and the original TIPER account were created together on August 31, 2020, with a test transaction exchanged between the two. We can see this creation sequence on-chain:
- The original TIPER account’s creation
- OG's creation an hour later
- Two minutes later, a test transaction where OG sends to TIPER
It is also worth nothing that TIPER and OG were both created by the same account,
IOAN.
That the OG Whale Wallet and the Current Whale wallet are the same wallet is also pretty clear. The current whale wallet was created on February 13, 2023 with the following sequence :
- The OG wallet did the genesis transaction to create the current whale wallet
- The current whale wallet then immediately sends a test transaction to TIPER
- Finally, OG flows its entire balance, 243 million ALGO, to the current whale wallet.
All three steps were completed within a 4 minute window. After the rollover transaction, the OG wallet has never been used again.
The following diagram shows the ancestry hierarchy of the TIPER network accounts and the Whale accounts .
General Network Structure
Here’s a diagram of my interpretation of the whale network structure, based on a trace of the transactions. This diagram is based on transactions from March 2023 to present, after the new whale wallet appeared in February.
Algo from the exchanges is deposited into the “router” accounts that in turn forward the Algo to either the Whale Wallet or theTIPER ring. The TIPER ring is very balanced with each account of the 11 accounts holding about the same amount of Algo. Outbound Algo flows through the TIPER ring to external addresses, with a current heavy weighting to Binance, OKX and Bithumb.
Here is an example of a router. Sort by “In” for more clarity. You can see Algo inbound from the exchanges (VADH is Bithumb), and outbound to both the TIPER ring and the New Whale Wallet (N2C3). The zero Algo transactions in the middle are spam.
https://flow.algo.surf/address/QZL25DVJ4A52D2EBT46LZPUNXBLLEC643XQKTSVPY4TWKGFW4S3ZWTZ7UE
Speaking of which, thanks to @D13.algo for creating http://flow.algo.surf, , it was instrumental in this analysis!
Thanks to CryptoFarmer1020 (Reddit) , @GovernorHat.Algo, and @D13.algo for their review. Also thanks to CryptoFarmer1020 and @danielschmidt.algo for their original analysis of the network.
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* Regarding Upbit’s listing date of ALGO - the meteoric rise of ALGO price that occurred in November 2021 was widely reported in the media to be due to Upbit’s listing of Algorand. However, some people were confused by this because, as we see in the Medium article that I linked to, Upbit had already announced listing in September 2020. I believe that the 2021 reporting was incorrect.
https://twitter.com/GuillaumeLambrt/status/1461313064691765258