Over the past couple of days I’ve been analyzing address profiles and clustering tags again. Honestly, the more I look, the more uneasy I feel… The on-chain data tools’ labels like “Smart Money” and “Exchange Outflows” are sometimes so delayed it’s ridiculous, and other times it feels like you could throw the system off just by swapping to a different route and splitting a few transactions. In the past, I would keep asking for an explanation: whose money is this exactly, where did it come from, and where is it going. Now I’m slowly shifting to, “I don’t pursue explanations anymore.” I just accept the randomness—because on-chain is ultimately just a trail of behavior, not an ID card.

My own approach is more like this: use tags as leads, not as a final judgment. When I see fund flows, I first go check a few original transactions, see whether the contract is newly deployed, and whether the same batch of wallets is running the task. If I can’t confirm it, I treat it as noise. After running around in L2 back alleys for a while, one of the most common items on my “things that trip you up” list is: trusting profiles too much, only to end up getting led by the script… That’s about it for now.