The Wallet in Both Top Threes: What PEPE and SHIB's Shared Whales Reveal
On October 2, 2026, one Ethereum wallet withdrew $4.41M of PEPE from an exchange. The next day it withdrew another $4.26M of PEPE. On October 2 it also withdrew $2.30M of SHIB.
Those three moves, $10.97M in total, put the same shortened address (0x487967…b7f9) in the top three largest whale moves of both PEPE and SHIB for the month. The same wallet also withdrew $2.38M of FLOKI on October 5.
Most "PEPE vs SHIB" comparisons treat the two tokens as two separate crowds with two separate stories. The whale data says otherwise. A meaningful slice of each token's large-wallet activity came from the same addresses, often in the same week. This piece follows those shared wallets through September 11 to October 10, 2026, and shows how to read an overlap number without over-reading it.
How big the overlap is
| Overlap measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Wallets that moved PEPE | 70 |
| Wallets that moved SHIB | 47 |
| Wallets that moved both | 23 |
| Distinct wallets across both | 94 |
| Share of SHIB's whale wallets also in PEPE | 48.9% |
| Share of PEPE's whale wallets also in SHIB | 32.9% |
Nearly half of the tracked wallets that touched SHIB in the window also touched PEPE. Roughly one in four of all 94 distinct wallets was active in both.
The asymmetry matters. SHIB's whale base sits largely inside PEPE's, while PEPE has a large group of wallets that never touched SHIB this month. If the question is "what were SHIB's whales doing," a sizable part of the answer is "the same thing they were doing in PEPE."
The early-October cluster
The overlap is not spread evenly across the month. It bunches around a few dates.
| Date (UTC) | Wallet (shortened) | Token | Move | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2 | 0x487967…b7f9 | PEPE | Withdrawal from exchange | $4.41M |
| Oct 2 | 0x487967…b7f9 | SHIB | Withdrawal from exchange | $2.30M |
| Oct 2 | 0xc5d3d8…31bd | SHIB | Withdrawal from exchange | $1.43M |
| Oct 3 | 0x487967…b7f9 | PEPE | Withdrawal from exchange | $4.26M |
| Oct 5 | 0xb383e9…77a2 | SHIB | Withdrawal from exchange | $4.68M |
| Oct 5 | 0xb383e9…77a2 | FLOKI | Withdrawal from exchange | $2.40M |
| Oct 5 | 0x487967…b7f9 | FLOKI | Withdrawal from exchange | $2.38M |
October 2 was PEPE's second-busiest day of the month, with $9.50M moved and $8.86M net leaving exchanges. It was also SHIB's second-busiest day, with $4.05M moved and $3.49M net leaving. October 5 was SHIB's busiest day ($5.11M, 25.8% of the month) and FLOKI's by a wide margin ($4.89M, 68.8% of FLOKI's month).
Read side by side, three memecoins had their largest exchange withdrawals of the month inside a four-day window, and two wallets account for most of the dollars. That is one cluster of activity showing up in three token tables, not three independent token stories.
Why one transfer can make a month
The October 5 SHIB withdrawal is worth isolating because of what it does to SHIB's numbers.
| SHIB, Sep 11 – Oct 10, 2026 | With the Oct 5 move | Without it |
|---|---|---|
| Net leaving exchanges | $7.87M | about $3.19M |
| Largest wallet's share of whale $ | 23.7% | — |
| Moves of $1M or more | 3 | 2 |
The wallet behind it made exactly one SHIB move in the whole 30-day window. Its entire SHIB total was that single $4.68M withdrawal, and that one move was 23.7% of all tracked SHIB whale dollars and more than half of SHIB's net leaving exchanges.
This is the general rule for any token where a few moves are large relative to the total: the month is only as broad as its largest move allows. SHIB's 69.9% withdrawal share is accurate. Without one wallet's one transfer, SHIB's month would have read as a modest, near-balanced lean. Both of those facts belong in any honest description.
PEPE shows the same mechanism in the opposite direction. The single largest PEPE move of the month was a deposit: $8.79M sent to an exchange on September 21 by a shortened wallet, 0x1d4896…0270. That day finished $4.70M net onto exchanges. And yet PEPE's month still ended $28.78M net leaving exchanges, because from September 22 through October 8 every single day leaned the other way. Over 30 days, one big move can dominate a token's month or be absorbed by it. The only way to know which is to look.
That same wallet, 0x1d4896…0270, also deposited $7.87M of UNI to an exchange on September 21. One address, one day, two very different tokens. It is a useful reminder that shared wallets are not limited to tokens that look alike.
How PEPE and SHIB's overlap compares with other pairs
Overlap is easier to judge with a reference point. Deep Blue Alpha's October head-to-heads measured the same statistic for two other pairs over the same window.
| Pair | Wallets that moved both | Share of the smaller token's whale wallets |
|---|---|---|
| PEPE and SHIB | 23 | 48.9% of SHIB's 47 |
| UNI and AAVE | 39 | 40.6% of AAVE's 96 |
| LINK and ONDO | 35 | 42.7% of ONDO's 82 |
The memecoin pair had the fewest shared wallets in absolute terms and the highest share. In every pair, roughly four to five in ten of the smaller token's whale wallets were also active in the larger one. That consistency is itself informative: large Ethereum wallets rarely touch only one token, so overlap of this size is the norm rather than a sign of anything coordinated.
The wallets that leaned each way
The overlap counts activity. The deeper data also counts direction, wallet by wallet. In PEPE, 52 wallets finished the window net withdrawing and 13 net depositing. In SHIB, 29 finished net withdrawing and 17 net depositing.
PEPE's headcount and its dollar withdrawal share told the same story, about three in four on the accumulation side either way. SHIB's did not. By dollars SHIB leaned 69.9% toward withdrawals; by headcount it was closer to six in ten. The gap is the October 5 wallet again: one large withdrawal tilts the dollar ratio much further than the wallet count.
September 21: one wallet, two deposit-side days
The cross-token pattern also runs in the distribution-side direction. September 21 was PEPE's busiest day of the month, with $13.77M moved and $4.70M net arriving at exchanges, driven by the $8.79M deposit from 0x1d4896…0270. The same day was one of UNI's busiest, with $20.04M moved and $7.72M net arriving at exchanges, and the same shortened wallet sent $7.87M of UNI to an exchange. Two tokens from different sectors had a deposit-heavy day, and one address sat at the centre of both.
How to read an overlap number
Overlap is one of the few whale statistics price charts cannot show, and it is easy to stretch too far. Three rules keep it honest.
- Overlap is shared activity, not shared direction. A wallet in the overlap could have withdrawn PEPE and deposited SHIB in the same week. In this window the clustered moves above happened to point the same way, but the overlap count alone does not tell you that.
- Overlap is not proof of holding. A withdrawal moves coins to an outside wallet. Where they went next is a separate question, and some of these coins may have moved again within days.
- State the denominator. "23 shared wallets" means little alone. "23 wallets, 48.9% of SHIB's whale wallets" says something specific.
The direction convention used throughout: coins leaving exchanges are an accumulation-side read and coins arriving are a distribution-side read. Almost none of this was DEX swapping (0.2% of PEPE whale dollars, 0.0% of SHIB's), so these are exchange transfers, not purchases.
How overlap was counted
A wallet counts toward the overlap if it made at least one tracked move in PEPE and at least one in SHIB between September 11 and October 10, 2026 (UTC), in any direction and of any size. Only wallets on Deep Blue Alpha's tracked whale list, about 21,880 Ethereum addresses at the time, are included. That definition is deliberately loose: a wallet with a single small SHIB move and dozens of PEPE moves counts the same as one heavily active in both. It measures shared presence, which is why the direction and size checks above matter before reading anything into it.
Tracing a shared wallet yourself
Finding a wallet that appears in two tokens takes a few minutes with public tools.
- On Deep Blue Alpha, open PEPE and SHIB on the same window and note the shortened wallets behind the largest moves.
- Where a shortened wallet appears on both pages, search the full address on Etherscan.
- Open the Token Transfers (ERC-20) tab. Without a filter, it lists every token the wallet moved, in date order, which shows the cluster directly.
- For each transfer, check the counterparty. A labelled exchange wallet sending to the address is a withdrawal; the address sending to one is a deposit.
- Note what happened after. If the coins moved on to another wallet or protocol within days, the withdrawal was a step, not a destination.
A worked rewrite
Here is how the same facts read with and without the wallet layer.
Without it: "Whales pulled $7.87M of SHIB and $28.78M of PEPE off exchanges this month, both leaning to the accumulation side."
With it: "Tracked whales took $7.87M of SHIB and $28.78M of PEPE net off exchanges. Twenty-three wallets were active in both, and two of them made the largest withdrawals in PEPE, SHIB and FLOKI between October 2 and 5. One SHIB withdrawal of $4.68M was more than half of SHIB's net."
The second version is longer and less dramatic. It is also the one that matches what the blockchain recorded.
What the overlap cannot tell you
It cannot identify the owners; Deep Blue Alpha does not attribute wallets to any person or entity. It cannot explain why the same wallets moved several memecoins in the same days. It sees only tracked wallets on Ethereum, so a wallet active in PEPE here and SHIB on another chain would not register as overlap. And it does not connect to price: over the 30 days to October 11, CoinGecko showed PEPE up 25.2% and SHIB up 3.7%, while the shared wallets pushed both tokens' exchange flow the same way.
Takeaway
The most informative number in this comparison is not a dollar total. It is 23: the tracked wallets active in both PEPE and SHIB, nearly half of SHIB's whale wallets. Follow them and the month resolves into a few clusters, especially October 2 to 5, when two wallets made the largest withdrawals across PEPE, SHIB and FLOKI. Before treating two tokens' whale flow as two separate signals, check whether it is the same wallets moving twice.
The full PEPE vs SHIB comparison, with the 30-day table, size and weekly breakdowns, is at PEPE vs SHIB: Whale Flow Compared. FLOKI's October 5 day is visible on its live token page, the memecoin whale board shows the current window, and the Top 50 Ethereum memecoins ranking places all three against the rest of the sector.
Data: Deep Blue Alpha tracked-wallet data, whale-scoped, September 11 – October 10, 2026 (UTC), Ethereum only.
Read the full analysis with interactive charts: The Wallet in Both Top Threes: What PEPE and SHIB's Shared Whales Reveal
Track smart money in real time at deepbluealpha.io — free tier, no signup required.
More research: deepbluealpha.io/research | Live feed: deepbluealpha.io/feed | Wallet leaderboard: deepbluealpha.io/wallets
Comments
Post a Comment