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Unchained

How Nansen’s New Trading Agent Makes It Easier to Follow the Smart Money Onchain

64 min episode · 2 min read
·
Alex Sanovic

Episode

64 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Investing, Startups, Fundraising & VC

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Agentic Trading Interface: Users can execute complex multi-transaction strategies through simple natural language commands like "rebalance my portfolio," which triggers multiple simultaneous transactions without manual clicking through separate interfaces. This eliminates the traditional friction of opening multiple tabs, switching wallets, and signing individual transactions that previously constrained trading frequency and complexity.
  • Fee Structure Advantage: Nansen charges 10 basis points for pro subscribers and 25 basis points for free users, matching or beating centralized exchange fees without markup on DEX aggregator prices. This pricing strategy removes the financial incentive to leave the platform for execution, keeping the entire workflow from discovery to trade completion within one interface.
  • Smart Money Discovery: The platform labels 500 million addresses algorithmically and through AI agents, enabling users to query what sophisticated traders bought in the last hour or any timeframe. Users can then immediately allocate funds to those tokens through the agent, creating a direct path from signal identification to position entry.
  • Trading Activity Amplification: The founder reports trading more in the past month than ever before due to reduced friction from AI-assisted execution. This suggests agentic interfaces will increase overall on-chain trading volume by lowering execution barriers, similar to how vibe coding enables more people to build software by reducing technical complexity.
  • Security Architecture: The product uses Privy embedded wallets that remain self-custodial, allowing private key export while preventing Nansen from accessing user funds. Users must manually approve each transaction with biometric authentication, maintaining control while the agent handles price discovery and routing optimization across multiple DEX aggregators.

What It Covers

Nansen CEO Alex Sanovic unveils the company's new AI trading agent that enables users to discover, research, and execute on-chain trades through natural language commands. The agent integrates real-time smart money tracking with DEX aggregation, charging just 10 basis points for pro users and 25 for free users while executing trades across Solana and Base.

Key Questions Answered

  • Agentic Trading Interface: Users can execute complex multi-transaction strategies through simple natural language commands like "rebalance my portfolio," which triggers multiple simultaneous transactions without manual clicking through separate interfaces. This eliminates the traditional friction of opening multiple tabs, switching wallets, and signing individual transactions that previously constrained trading frequency and complexity.
  • Fee Structure Advantage: Nansen charges 10 basis points for pro subscribers and 25 basis points for free users, matching or beating centralized exchange fees without markup on DEX aggregator prices. This pricing strategy removes the financial incentive to leave the platform for execution, keeping the entire workflow from discovery to trade completion within one interface.
  • Smart Money Discovery: The platform labels 500 million addresses algorithmically and through AI agents, enabling users to query what sophisticated traders bought in the last hour or any timeframe. Users can then immediately allocate funds to those tokens through the agent, creating a direct path from signal identification to position entry.
  • Trading Activity Amplification: The founder reports trading more in the past month than ever before due to reduced friction from AI-assisted execution. This suggests agentic interfaces will increase overall on-chain trading volume by lowering execution barriers, similar to how vibe coding enables more people to build software by reducing technical complexity.
  • Security Architecture: The product uses Privy embedded wallets that remain self-custodial, allowing private key export while preventing Nansen from accessing user funds. Users must manually approve each transaction with biometric authentication, maintaining control while the agent handles price discovery and routing optimization across multiple DEX aggregators.
  • Future Agent Vaults: Nansen plans to develop infrastructure for users to deposit capital into successful traders' agent vaults, with proposed fee structures of 2% management fees and 20% performance fees. This requires solving custody challenges for both private keys and agent code to prevent tampering through unauthorized access or prompt injection attacks.

Notable Moment

The founder revealed his company ran an internal hackathon where employees used Claude Code to build features in two hours that had been on the roadmap as difficult, long-term projects. This demonstration of how AI coding tools collapse development timelines led him to predict 2026 will be the most transformative year in technology history as billions apply similar capabilities.

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Episode Transcript

The last month after that we launched our beta, I've been trading more than I've ever traded in terms of just activity. And I think it it's reflective of that, like, process being lubricated by AI because it's just so simple for me to just say, hey. Act on this now. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this livestream. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed in the show. For more disclosures, visit unchainedcrypto.com. Before we start, I wanted to introduce you all to our sponsor, Walrus, a project we actually use here at Unchained for data storage. Throughout the episode, you'll hear short excerpts from Rebecca Simons, managing executive at the Walrus Foundation. We'll start with this clip on why Walrus is good for large data files. If you look at most apps today, they depend on quite a complex mesh of different infrastructure, a lot of which is centralized. Walrus is a decentralized data platform. It's particularly good with large unstructured data files, and it allows you to store and use those without dependency on any centralized systems. It works really well as part of the SUI stack. It was created by Miston Labs, who are also the originators of that SWIS stack. And what that means is natively together, they allow developers to build, with trust, ownership, privacy baked in right from the beginning. And what this does is it allows you to build use cases that monetize data in ways that just have not been possible before. So there are whole new revenue streams that are now available to builders to, to come and build on Morris. Today's guest is Alex Sanovic, cofounder and CEO at Nansen. Welcome, Alex. Thank you, Laura. Good to be here. I'm a big fan of your work. Yeah. Nice to nice to chat with you. I'm just realizing, I don't think I've ever had you on the show, which is crazy. But we have a really great opportunity to chat with you, which is that Nansen has big news coming out today. You're launching a new AI trading agent. Explain what it does. Yes. Yeah. So some people might know Nansen, for the work we've done over the years on on chain analytics. So, basically, a lot of investors and traders use our product to discover tokens, perform due diligence on them. But then at the end of the day, they historically have gone to another product to actually execute the trade. And so what we've done is that we've basically taken this function in house, which means that you can do your whole on chain investing and trading within the same product. Discovery, research, and then ultimately execution in one product. And the thing that's kind of unique …

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  • NansenBy guest
    Nansen CEO Alex Sanovic unveils the company's new AI trading agent that enables users to discover, research, and execute on-chain trades through natural language commands.
  • by Anthropic

    The founder revealed his company ran an internal hackathon where employees used Claude Code to build features in two hours that had been on the roadmap as difficult, long-term projects.
  • The product uses Privy embedded wallets that remain self-custodial, allowing private key export while preventing Nansen from accessing user funds.

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