Who Is Nicolas Vaiman and How Bubblemaps Became a Forensics Desk

Nicolas Vaiman is the chief executive and co-founder of Bubblemaps, the French company whose coloured bubble diagrams have become one of the standard ways a trader checks who actually owns a token before buying it. His company's token, BMT, closed Tuesday 25 August at $0.023043 on Phemex spot daily bars, up 52.4% from Monday 24 August's close of $0.015118, on reported 24-hour volume of roughly $169 million on one feed against $149 million on another. That move is what put his company's name in front of people who had never typed it into a search bar.

Vaiman himself has no Wikipedia page. Page one of a search on his name returns a company database entry and a professional profile, which is unusual for someone whose firm's findings have been cited on network television and in national business press. A separate piece on this site takes the token itself apart, covering the squeeze mechanics, the contract addresses and the supply reconciliation. This one answers the other question, which is who built the thing, what it measures, and what happens when you point a concentration-analysis company's own tool at its own coin.

Nicolas Vaiman at a Glance

The Failed Aggregator That Turned Into an Analytics Company

Vaiman's route into this business started badly, which he has said openly. He came into crypto during the 2017 bull run, lost money early, and stayed anyway. In 2018, while holding down a job he has described as unfulfilling, he started Cryptonavia, a price and market data aggregator built along the lines of the large listing sites that already dominated that category.

Cryptonavia did not become one of those sites. What it did instead was drift toward on-chain data, and that drift is the entire origin story of the company he leads. In a 2025 interview with DL News, Vaiman described the pivot as following where the useful information actually sat. Aggregated prices were a commodity that a dozen well-funded competitors already served. Wallet-level ownership data was messy, largely unreadable, and almost nobody had made it legible to a non-technical reader.

Bubblemaps was founded in 2022 with Léo Pons as chief technology officer, and the two had worked together on Cryptonavia before it. The seed round of roughly $3.2 million landed on 18 September 2023, led by INCE Capital, with a mix of venture funds and individual angels alongside it, according to company records compiled by Tracxn. For a company that has since been quoted in national business press, that is a small raise. It is worth holding onto as context for everything that follows, because the reach came from the output rather than the balance sheet.

What Bubblemaps Actually Does to a Token

Every holder of a token becomes a bubble, sized by the percentage of supply that address controls. The interesting part is not the bubbles themselves but the lines drawn between them.

When the clustering engine concludes that two addresses are likely controlled by the same entity, it connects them and colours them together. According to the company's own write-up of the clustering method, the signals feeding that judgment include funding relationships, synchronised behaviour, activity in the launch block, and shared transaction counterparties. A token that looks broadly distributed as a list of 500 addresses can resolve into three clusters the moment those lines are drawn.

Think of it as the difference between a guest list and a seating chart. The list tells you 500 people are in the room. The chart tells you that 400 of them arrived in the same three cars.

Two features do most of the work beyond the base map. Magic Nodes labels wallet types automatically, marking exchange addresses, project treasuries and previously flagged entities so a reader does not have to research each one by hand. Time Travel replays the holder map at earlier points in a token's history, which is how a distribution that looks fine on the day you check it can be shown to have looked very different in its first hour of trading. That second feature is the one that matters most for Solana launches and for tokens that come out of memecoin launchpads such as Pump.fun, where the opening minutes decide who owns what.

The Intel Desk extends that from a tool into something closer to a newsroom. Users lock BMT behind cases they want investigated, the weight of locked tokens sets which cases get priority, and contributors who produce the findings get paid in the same token. At the time of writing, the live desk shows roughly 6.12 million BMT locked across open cases, with subjects ranging from an exchange exploit to a controversy over the LAB token. Whatever else that model is, it is an attempt to put a price on research that the industry had previously been getting from volunteers.

The Investigations That Built the Reputation

The clearest example of the tool doing what it claims came in January 2025. Bubblemaps posted that roughly 90% of the supply of the MELANIA memecoin sat in a single wallet, a distribution the firm said did not match what the project's own website advertised. It followed that with an analysis reporting that wallets it attributed to the team had sold around $30 million of the token. None of that required privileged access. It required someone to look at public data and publish what was there.

The higher-profile case, and the more contested one, involved prediction markets. Bubblemaps reported a cluster of nine interlinked Polymarket accounts that had netted roughly $2.4 million on well-timed bets about United States military action in Iran, with a win rate the firm put at 98% across more than 80 positions. The finding was carried by CBS's 60 Minutes in May 2026 and became the reference point for the insider-trading debate around prediction venues.

Polymarket disputed the framing rather than the raw data. The platform said it operates market integrity infrastructure that combines explicit insider-trading rules, automated surveillance and blockchain forensics, and pointed to its Enhanced Market Integrity Rules as prohibiting exactly the behaviour described. Both positions are on the record and a reader should weigh them together. A cluster of coordinated accounts with an improbable hit rate is a real pattern in public data. A pattern is also not a proven identity, and no individual has been named or charged over those accounts.

And the desk has pushed the other way when the analysis was thin. In a 5 January post, Bubblemaps rejected viral claims linking a trader in a Polymarket market on Venezuela to a co-founder of World Liberty Financial, saying the on-chain reasoning behind the accusation rested on weak assumptions, as crypto.news reported. Vaiman has also been quoted directly on that project's finances, telling Fortune on 10 April 2026 that roughly 5% of the WLFI supply sitting as collateral on a lending protocol created a liquidation risk for the token's price. A firm that only ever confirms the viral accusation is a hype machine. One that publicly kills a popular story is doing something harder.

The Awkward Number on Its Own Token

Third-party holder tallies put the top wallets on BMT at roughly 76.3% of supply. That is a difficult figure for a company whose entire product is the detection of concentrated ownership, and it belongs in any fair profile of the business.

Two caveats apply, and neither cancels the point. Top-holder tables generally do not separate individual owners from bridge contracts, staking pools, exchange custody and locked vesting allocations, which is precisely the distinction Bubblemaps built a clustering engine to make. BMT also runs a scheduled vesting programme, so a portion of supply sits in contracts by design rather than in anyone's hands. What none of that changes is the plain reading, which is that a reader applying the company's own standard to the company's own coin would flag it and ask questions. The company has published nothing that resolves the question.

The same discipline applies to the price action itself. A 52.4% single-session gain on a token trading far below its March 2025 highs is a liquidity event, not a verdict on the business. The companion piece on this site works through the mechanics of that move in detail.

What to Watch Next

Three things will tell you more about this company over the next two quarters than any single investigation does.

The Intel Desk locked balance. Roughly 6.12 million BMT locked is a modest number against a supply of one billion. If that figure climbs materially, the paid-research model is working. If it stalls, the desk is closer to a marketing surface than a business line.

Repeat placements outside crypto media. Network television coverage of an on-chain analysis is rare, and it is the thing separating this firm from a dozen competing dashboards that show the same public data. A second placement of that size would confirm the first was not a one-off.

How the firm handles the next accusation aimed at a large partner. The Venezuela pushback is the strongest single piece of evidence in Vaiman's favour, because saying no to a story people wanted to be true costs attention. The next time that choice comes up is the real test of the standard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nicolas Vaiman?

Nicolas Vaiman is the co-founder and chief executive of Bubblemaps, a French on-chain analytics company that visualises token ownership as connected bubbles. He entered crypto in 2017, founded the data aggregator Cryptonavia in 2018, and pivoted that project into Bubblemaps in 2022 alongside chief technology officer Léo Pons.

What does Bubblemaps actually detect?

It groups wallet addresses that appear to be controlled by the same entity, using funding paths, timing, launch-block activity and shared counterparties as evidence. The output shows a token's real ownership concentration rather than the raw address count, which is why it gets used before buying a newly launched coin.

Is a Bubblemaps cluster proof of wrongdoing?

No, and treating it that way is the most common mistake retail makes with the tool. A cluster is a statistical inference from public transaction patterns, and it can legitimately capture an exchange's internal wallets, a bridge contract or a market maker rather than a coordinated insider group.

Can you buy BMT on Phemex?

No, BMT carries Delisted status on Phemex and has no live perpetual or spot market here, so any page that appears to render a BMT trading pair is a template fallback rather than a real order book. Traders wanting exposure to this corner of the market generally hold BTC or ETH instead.

Bottom Line

Vaiman built a business on a simple observation, which is that blockchain ownership data was public and nobody had made it readable. The record that came out of it is stronger than the funding behind it, with a $3.2 million seed producing findings that reached network television and national business press. The number to weigh against that record is 76.3% of BMT supply concentrated in top wallets, unexplained by the company, on a token whose selling point is concentration analysis. Watch the Intel Desk locked balance and watch what the firm does the next time a viral accusation points at someone large. A forensics desk is only worth what it is willing to publish when the finding is inconvenient, and that is the metric on which this one should be judged.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.