Recently, I’ve been seeing a bunch of address profiling tools that categorize people as “smart money,” “whales,” “new wallets,” and then pair it with a fund-flow Sankey diagram—somehow it all looks quite convincing. But to be frank, most of these labels are basically post-hoc summaries: if they make money, they’re called smart money; if they lose, they become “retail sentiment.” And with on-chain transfers now so easy to shuffle around, cross-chain transfers, aggregators, and one-click address swaps mean clustering can inadvertently bundle unrelated addresses together.

These days, I put more trust in “behavior” than “identity”: whether the same group of addresses consistently uses the same set of protocols, whether there’s real interaction (not just a few quick transactions and then disappearing), and how they respond when things get volatile. The narratives around modularity and DA have been keeping developers pretty hyped lately, but users end up looking completely lost… Fund flows are the same, too—no matter how pretty the diagram is, if it doesn’t map to real use cases, the end result might just be another story about pumping up numbers. For now, it’s just like that—after seeing it too many times, it’s also easy to get convinced by my own reasoning.