I used to be quite superstitious about those address profiling tools, thinking that just by tagging something as "whale/smart money/retail investor" I understood it; now I’m more skeptical, because clustering is often just guesswork: the same person might have multiple addresses, or a single address could be a hot wallet of an exchange transferring funds, and the flow looks smooth, but in reality, it’s internal aggregation or market making back and forth.

My current approach is: treat tags as reminders, not conclusions. If I really want to analyze, I first check if the interactions form a single chain, whether the authorizations are messy, and I keep records. After a couple of days, I review whether I was led astray by a "narrative filter."

Recently, the noise around privacy coins/mixing coins has been quite intense, with compliance boundaries tearing apart, which ironically shows that profiling isn’t a magic key: the flow you see and the actions you should take are separated by several layers. Anyway, I’m just riding the tide, picking up shells, and I accept that it might take a bit longer.