By Alvin Kan, Chief Operating Officer at Bitget Wallet.
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Stablecoins now move trillions of dollars through crypto networks, and on-chain trading has reached a scale institutions recognize. As someone who has watched this shift from inside the wallet industry, I can tell you: the most useful market insight is no longer flowing from centralized data feeds. In crypto, settlement is disclosure. Intelligence has migrated from closed terminals to open ledgers, and the clearest read on positioning appears when a wallet signs a transaction.
Most of traditional finance still thinks of a wallet the way it thinks of a checkbook: something you use to authorize a transaction and then put away. That misses what is actually happening. Liquidity, leverage, and risk are migrating on-chain at a pace that makes the wallet the live control surface for anyone running real money through DeFi. A price chart tells you what already happened. A wallet trace tells you what someone is about to do.
Why Bloomberg-Era Tools Miss the On-Chain Signal
Bloomberg terminals were built for markets organized around centralized venues and controlled disclosures. They aggregate prices and reference data from intermediaries that define the official record. Crypto-native capital moves permissionlessly, pseudonymously, and continuously — routing across chains and protocols where the most revealing signals appear on-chain well before any venue-level dashboard registers them. By the time a terminal aggregates the signal, the strategic decision has already been recorded on the ledger.
On-chain strategy rarely shows up as a single trade. It unfolds across multiple transactions — shifting collateral, repricing risk, relocating liquidity across venues and chains. A bridge inflow into a fast-growing layer 2 network can appear hours before price and volume react on major exchanges. Addresses remain pseudonymous, yet activity forms consistent patterns that allow analysts to cluster and track cohorts. When those cohorts accumulate, distribute, hedge, or relocate liquidity, the behavior becomes visible in wallet activity before it becomes a market narrative.
From Price Discovery to Behavior Discovery
Crypto markets have moved beyond pure speculation. Today, they increasingly reward behavior discovery first, with price discovery following after repositioning is already visible on-chain. The most valuable signals come from observing how capital behaves: where liquidity accumulates, where it withdraws, and how it migrates across chains and protocols.
Take decentralized perpetual contracts, which let traders take leveraged long or short positions without an expiry date and without a broker in the middle. At points in 2025, these markets cleared more than $1 trillion in a single month, roughly 20% of what centralized derivatives exchanges handle. The thing is, the outcome of a perp trade depends on positioning, collateral moves, and how close someone is to getting liquidated. All of that shows up in wallet activity before it ever prints on a chart, because the capital has to move between venues on-chain first. Nansen spotted this early and turned it into a business, packaging on-chain events into sentiment and rotation indicators that funds and active traders actually pay.
On-chain stablecoin transaction volume in 2025 is estimated at around $33 trillion (per industry aggregators), with global stablecoin supply above $300 billion — confirming that the capital flowing through these wallet-visible channels is no longer marginal.
When Everyone Sees the Data, Insight Becomes Power
Here is the paradox that defines this new era: on-chain data is public by default, but understanding it is not. Anyone can query transfers and contract interactions. Few can connect them to intent, timing, and risk in time to act. Transparency does not eliminate advantage — it relocates it. The edge belongs to those who can attribute activity to strategic patterns, infer intent from sequencing, and contextualize isolated actions within a broader market narrative.
Wallets sit closest to the signature, which means they can surface approval risk before a transaction executes and flag flow-driven shifts affecting funding rates (the cost of holding a leveraged position), borrowing costs, and slippage (the price impact of executing a large trade). Closing the interpretation gap demands better attribution, clearer risk labeling, and wallet-native alerts that translate raw actions into decision-grade context.
That said, real constraints remain. Privacy-preserving design must protect users without turning markets opaque. Clustering mistakes — mislabeling wallet activity — can carry real consequences, so analytics should surface confidence levels and give users meaningful controls. These are solvable engineering problems, not structural barriers.
A New Center of Financial Power, with Broader Access
The terminal era rewarded privileged access and gated information. The on-chain era, by contrast, favors those who can read public actions quickly and interpret what they imply before the rest of the market catches up. As wallets combine execution with real-time context, power shifts toward funds, market makers, protocols, and an emerging class of sophisticated retail users who read positioning and respond decisively.
This will spill past trading desks. People are already using wallets to pay with stablecoins, park idle cash in yield vaults, and settle tabs with merchants. That everyday activity generates the same on-chain trail that professional traders study, and wallets are starting to package that trail into alerts and plain-language summaries that a non-specialist can act on. Bloomberg's real product was never data; it was the feeling that you sat at the center of the market. Wallets flip that model. The data is already public. The new competition is over who can help you understand what it means, and that race has no velvet rope.
About the author
Alvin Kan is the COO of Bitget Wallet, the world’s leading everyday finance app. He played a key leadership role in the company’s rebrand and global expansion strategy, helping scale the platform to over 90 million users. He previously led ecosystem growth at BNB Chain and Sei Labs and served as Head of Data Insights at LinkedIn. With extensive experience across Web3 and Web2, Alvin plays a pivotal role in shaping Bitget Wallet's strategic direction, driving innovation, growth, and the mass adoption of Web3.