Alex Svanevik, CEO and co-founder of Nansen
Singapore-based Nansen has spent years serving to buyers make sense of on-chain exercise, turning uncooked blockchain knowledge into alerts about capital flows, behaviour, and market construction. The GIC- and Andreessen Horowitz-backed agency has simply launched an AI buying and selling agent designed to function as an agentic system: ingesting real-time on-chain knowledge, reasoning over reside market circumstances, and executing trades instantly quite than stopping at perception era. With this transfer, Nansen is pushing past analytics into execution, introducing an AI-driven system that may interpret reside on-chain alerts and act on them instantly.
e27 spoke with Alex Svanevik, CEO and co-founder of Nansen, about what this shift says concerning the maturity of crypto markets, the evolving position of AI in buying and selling, and the way entry to institutional-grade workflows might reshape who will get to maneuver first on-chain.
Excerpts from the interplay:
You’ve positioned Nansen as shifting from “pure analytics” to “agentic buying and selling.” What was the important thing inflexion level that satisfied you the market was prepared for this shift? How do you see this repositioning affecting your aggressive moat towards different on-chain analytics platforms?
The inflexion level was realising that insights alone weren’t sufficient anymore. Customers might see alternatives on Nansen, however they nonetheless needed to go away our platform to behave on them. On the identical time, AI matured to the purpose the place it might safely motive over reside on-chain knowledge in actual time.
Additionally Learn: ‘The long run is on-chain’: Nansen CEO on AI, staking, and new development plans
By closing the loop between perception and execution, we’re not simply including a characteristic; we’re altering the workflow. Our moat deepens as a result of that is constructed on Nansen’s proprietary 500 million-plus labelled pockets dataset, which opponents can’t simply replicate.
A press launch notes that Singapore, a serious crypto hub, is restricted from accessing Nansen’s buying and selling options. How does this regulatory limitation impression your development technique in Southeast Asia, and what’s your timeline for increasing into these restricted markets?
Our person base is international by nature, with the US as our largest market, adopted by established markets akin to Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, and powerful momentum in rising markets, together with Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.
Nansen is basically an on-chain, non-custodial product. It places us in a special class from conventional custodial exchanges or brokers, as we’re basically a expertise supplier.
Moreover, regulatory interpretations can fluctuate considerably throughout jurisdictions. In some markets, together with Singapore, we’ve taken a intentionally conservative method by limiting sure performance whereas we deal with our core strengths: on-chain analytics and portfolio monitoring.
From a development perspective, this hasn’t been a constraint. Southeast Asia is a vital area for us, and our development there in the present day stems from our management in on-chain analytics. On the subject of increasing performance in additional tightly regulated jurisdictions, we take a long-term view.
How does the introduction of buying and selling performance change Nansen’s monetisation technique? Will you preserve a freemium mannequin, introduce buying and selling charges, or undertake a hybrid method?
Our objective has all the time been to floor the sign and create winners with our product.
As we speak, we’re making our Solana analytics out there to our free customers as properly. That is a part of a transfer to make Nansen accessible to extra individuals.
Moreover, we just lately simplified our pricing to a single plan, Professional, at US$49/month. Beforehand, our customers had been paying as much as US$999/month for a similar options, so that they now actually get 20x the worth. We’re taking part in the lengthy sport and wished to make Nansen accessible to extra individuals.
Additionally Learn: On-chain analytics agency Nansen acquires staking supplier stakeWithUs
The Professional plan provides you the most effective on-chain analytics, the most effective on-chain agent, and the bottom buying and selling charges at 0.1 per cent.
With over 500 million labelled addresses as your aggressive benefit, how do you forestall opponents from constructing comparable datasets, and the way steadily do it is advisable to replace and validate this knowledge to keep up accuracy?
This dataset is the results of years of steady labelling, behavioural evaluation, and validation throughout a number of market cycles. We replace and re-validate knowledge constantly as a result of on-chain behaviour adjustments every single day. The true benefit isn’t simply scale; it’s accuracy, context, and historical past.
How do you differentiate Nansen AI from established crypto buying and selling platforms like Kraken, Coinbase, or Bybit which are additionally integrating AI options? What’s your unfair benefit?
These platforms begin with custody and execution after which add analytics. We begin with intelligence. Nansen AI is constructed on reside, on-chain behavioural knowledge that exhibits who’s shifting capital, the place, and why. That enables us to motive about markets in a approach that price-centric platforms can’t. Buying and selling is a pure extension of that intelligence, not an add-on.
You declare Nansen AI outperforms ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok on on-chain benchmarks. What particular benchmarks are you utilizing? Moderately than positioning Nansen AI towards general-purpose fashions, might you combine with ChatGPT or Claude plugins to achieve a broader viewers? What are the trade-offs you’ve thought of?
We examined this in real-world on-chain questions: pockets identification, token discovery, due diligence, and portfolio evaluation. Nansen AI hit over 85 per cent high quality scores in Knowledgeable Mode. GPT-5? Round 20 per cent.
Normal LLMs don’t perceive pockets labelling or buying and selling patterns. We truly use basis fashions as a part of our stack; we always benchmark them, then fine-tune and prolong them with on-chain capabilities. We even route sure prompts to particular fashions based mostly on what they’re optimised for. However the intelligence is baked into our system, not simply retrieved from an information layer.
The press launch emphasises that “the agent operates underneath user-defined guidelines” and “doesn’t take custody of funds.” How do you steadiness giving customers highly effective, autonomous buying and selling capabilities with this dedication to transparency and management?
The agent is highly effective, however the person is all the time in management. Each motion relies on user-defined guidelines, totally clear, and executed on verifiable blockchain knowledge. We don’t take custody of funds, and customers can intervene or cease the agent at any time.
What’s your person acquisition technique for this new buying and selling product? Are you focusing on retail merchants migrating from Coinbase/Kraken, or institutional buyers in search of subtle evaluation instruments?
Customers already come to Nansen to find and analysis what’s occurring on-chain. We’re already a vacation spot. Now, we’re making the person expertise extra streamlined and built-in so you may execute your trades by way of our interface. By partnering with the most effective DEX aggregators on this planet, we provide optimised routing and charges as little as 0.1 per cent. Why would customers commerce anyplace else?
Past buying and selling, what different on-chain actions do you envision your AI agent performing within the subsequent 12-24 months? Are you exploring lending, staking, governance participation, or different DeFi primitives?
Our product imaginative and prescient is easy: commerce the whole lot on-chain, with AI. That is what we name A New Method To Commerce. We’ve thought deeply about what buying and selling appears like in 2030. As a substitute of ready till then, we determined to construct that person expertise in the present day.
Additionally Learn: Nansen raises US$75M to assist customers make knowledgeable choices earlier than investing in crypto, tokens
Within the close to time period, we’ll carry our AI agent to the online; at present it’s solely accessible by way of our cellular app.
Nansen additionally affords staking, which grew from US$60 million to US$2 billion AUM in simply 9 months. We’ll proceed to develop the chains we assist round this, permitting customers to do the whole lot on-chain from Nansen: uncover, determine, commerce, stake, and monitor.
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