01Clustering
Wallet clustering basics
Clustering joins addresses that behave as one operator. Funding edges, timing co-movement and fee-payer overlap, with the false-positive rate each heuristic carries.
Open the case fileEvidence: gathering chain data someone else can check
An analysis is only as good as the pull behind it. Most disagreements about whether a pair traded organically turn out to be disagreements about the window, the venue coverage or whether routed legs were counted once or three times, and none of those are visible in a finished chart.
This section is about the unglamorous half of the work: writing the question before touching the data, storing raw fields instead of derived ratios, recording the gaps honestly, and building wallet clusters as hypotheses that carry their own false-positive rate.
- What this section answers
- How to collect and structure on-chain evidence so a second analyst can reproduce or contradict it.
- What it will not do
- Publish addresses, identify operators, or present a heuristic as if it were calibrated.
- Where it hands off
- The patterns themselves are described in Signatures; how firmly to state a finding sits in the Grey zone.
2 case files in this section
How to collect chain data so that a second analyst can reproduce your reading: which fields to store, which to derive, how wallet clusters are built, and where each method quietly stops working.
02Method
Gathering evidence from chain data
A reproducible collection method: define the window, pull the transactions, store raw fields rather than conclusions, and record every step so a reviewer can disagree with you properly.
Open the case fileWhat evidence work is actually for
A reproducible pull does not make a reading correct. It makes the reading arguable, which is the only property that lets a mistake be found later by someone who was not in the room.
Signatures
The shapes produced activity leaves in a transaction record: spacing that is too regular, sizes drawn from a narrow set, round trips that return their own inventory, and counterparty graphs that collapse to a handful of funders.
Open the sectionGrey zone
The region where the same on-chain footprint has several honest explanations. Market making, incentive farming, treasury rebalancing and produced flow overlap here, and the correct output is a confidence level rather than a verdict.
Open the sectionGlossary
Every term this desk uses, defined once and used the same way everywhere: signatures, cluster edges, confidence bands and the words that are deliberately avoided.
Open the glossary