NFT (Non-fungible Token) has drastically increased in its size, accounting
for over \$16.9B of total market capitalization. Despite the rapid growth of
NFTs, this market has not been examined thoroughly from a financial
perspective. In this paper, we conduct methodical analyses to identify NFT
market movers who play a significant role in potentially manipulating and
oscillating NFT values. We collect over 3.8M NFT transaction data from the
Ethereum Blockchain from January 2021 to February 2022 to extract trading
information in line with the NFT lifecycle: (i) mint, (ii) transfer/sale, and
(iii) burn. Based on the size of held NFT values, we classify NFT traders into
three groups (whales, dolphins, and minnows). In total, we analyze 430K traders
from 91 different NFT collection sources. We find that the top 0.1\% of NFT
traders (i.e., whales) drive the NFT market with consistent, high returns. We
then identify and characterize the NFT whales' unique investment strategies
(e.g., mint/sale patterns, wash trading) to empirically understand the whales
in the NFT market for the first time.