01Comparison
Market making or wash trading
Two activities that share a footprint and differ in intent. The features that lean one way, the features that lean the other, and the cases where chain data simply cannot decide.
Open the case fileThe grey zone: where honest explanations compete
The grey zone is not a gap in the data. It is a region where the data is complete and still supports more than one honest reading, because the thing that separates the readings is intent and intent is not a field in any transaction.
Most public commentary skips this zone by picking whichever explanation is most interesting. The two files here do the opposite: they set out what leans each way, name the cases that cannot be decided at all, and define the wording a conclusion has to use so that a reader can tell evidence from judgement.
- What this section answers
- How to reason when several explanations survive the evidence, and how to write that up without overstating it.
- What it will not do
- Apply a regulatory term to any identifiable party or treat a pattern as a motive.
- Where it hands off
- Pattern definitions sit in Signatures; the collection method behind any claim sits in Evidence.
2 case files in this section
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.
02Standards
Stating confidence honestly
An evidence standard for volume analysis: four confidence bands, the falsification test every claim must carry, and the sentences this desk refuses to write.
Open the case fileWhy the grey zone gets its own section
Every interesting case in volume analysis ends up here. Putting it in one place keeps the pattern files from quietly smuggling a verdict into a description, and it gives every other page on the site one standard to defer to.
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 sectionEvidence
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.
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