Arkham Intelligence review: is free wallet tracking worth the trade-off?
Arkham lets anyone paste a wallet address and see who probably owns it, for nothing. We spent a week following whale wallets, checking transactions and testing the bounty market that pays people to unmask addresses, to see what the free tier actually gets you and what it costs the crypto users being watched.
Our verdict
Arkham's free explorer genuinely helps a reader follow whale wallets and fund flows that would otherwise take hours of manual block-explorer digging, and its entity tags on exchange and fund wallets are accurate often enough to trust for a first read. The catch is that the same tagging engine runs on a bounty market called Intel Exchange, where anyone can pay to have a stranger's wallet identity posted for sale, and that model sits uneasily next to a tool marketed as neutral research. Use it to watch known whales and check a suspicious address before you send funds, but treat any freshly tagged small wallet with some skepticism until other sources confirm it.
Best for: Readers who want free wallet-tracking data on whales, funds and exchanges without paying for a Nansen-style subscription
A whale wallet moves nine figures of Bitcoin and half of crypto Twitter reposts a screenshot within minutes. Arkham Intelligence is usually where that screenshot came from: a free dashboard that turns a raw hexadecimal address into a name, a history and sometimes a headline. We spent a week pointing it at known whales, fresh addresses and a few transactions we already understood, to see how much of that reputation the free tier earns.
What you get without paying anything
Arkham's core product, the part covered by this review, costs nothing. Search any address on Bitcoin, Ethereum or one of dozens of other supported chains and you get a labeled history: exchange deposits, known fund wallets, tagged entities where Arkham has identified one. The site's own research feed leans into this constantly, publishing running tallies of the biggest Bitcoin holders by category, from spot ETFs down to still-unidentified early wallets tied to Satoshi Nakamoto, a headline the homepage itself leads with.
Traders we spoke with while researching this piece put Arkham's tagging accuracy on exchange wallet types above 99 percent, which matches what we saw testing known Binance, Coinbase and OKX cold wallets: the labels were correct every time. That confidence drops for smaller or newly active wallets, where a tag can be a reasonable inference rather than a confirmed identity, and Arkham does not publish an accuracy audit of its own to lean on instead.
The explorer that leads with a slogan, not a feature list
