In this episode, host Friederike Ernst is joined by Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, to explore the platform's radical pivot from passive on-chain analytics to active, AI-driven agentic trading. Alex unpacks the technical hurdles of labeling over 500 million addresses, the transition from raw data into harmonized insights, and why true alpha now lies in attribution rather than raw data . He explains how Nansen uses ClickHouse databases and a mix of algorithmic heuristics, agentic teams, and human specialists to maintain the highest industry precision.
The conversation dives deep into the intersection of LLMs and blockchain, exploring how standard AI models lack domain-specific common sense and why Nansen augments them with real-time data and visual "artifacts". Alex introduces "Nansen Gym," a simulated historical replay environment for training trading agents and teases the upcoming release of "Smart Money 2.0", which aims to predict future profitable addresses with 2-3x uplift on precision. Finally, they discuss the existential risks of AI, the striking parallels between open-source AI and early DeFi, and why Alex believes agentic trading will be the absolute default by 2028.
Chapters
- 00:00 Intro & Context
- 04:15 Nansen's Evolution & Agentic Trading
- 09:30 Harmonizing Data & The Attribution Layer
- 15:00 Deterministic vs. Inferred Labeling (Uniswap vs. Binance)
- 21:45 Evaluating AI Agents: LLMs as Judges
- 27:10 User Privacy & Public Blockchain Realities
- 35:20 Building a Unified Trading OS
- 42:15 Smart Money 2.0: Predicting Which Wallets Win
- 49:00 The Limitations of Vanilla LLMs in Crypto
- 55:30 Nansen Gym & Time-Traveling AI Agents
- 59:45 The Open Source AI vs. DeFi Parallel
Links
- Alex Svanevik on X: https://x.com/ASvanevik
- Nansen: https://www.nansen.ai/
- NEAR: https://near.ai/
Sponsors:
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