The dormant wallet that wakes up
A wallet that traded, went silent for months, then returns with one large concentrated bet — the classic signature of someone who came back for a known event. Running at +51% through 23 settlements.
The hypothesisThe fresh-wallet "insider" signal failed because it can't separate informed money from loud money. Add a costly-to-fake filter: a wallet with real history that went dormant for months and returns with one large, focused bet. Random gamblers don't hibernate; people who learn something specific do.
The test
Each large bet in the whale feed triggers a dormancy measurement via the bettor's full public activity history — how long since this wallet last did anything, excluding the current burst? Wake-ups from ≥90 days of silence with a sanely-priced book become would-enter signals, logged at the live executable ask and settled at resolution. Paper only, by policy: its parent signal burned five thousand paper copies proving that plausible insider signatures usually aren't.
The result
Through 23 settled signals: +51% ROI at the logged asks — with every caveat a 23-sample deserves. The base rate is low (genuine long-dormancy wake-ups with large bets are rare), which is both why accrual is slow and why the signal might actually work: the filter is expensive to satisfy by accident. Seven settlements remain to the pre-registered 30-signal gate.
Conclusion
Open, and behaving like the thesis predicts so far. If the gate lands positive, this becomes the best surviving member of the "follow informed money" family — the one where the tell is time rather than size. The discipline holds regardless: signals this rare tempt you to trust them early, and 23 good settlements is precisely the sample at which most published strategies declare victory. We wait for the gate.