Lately, looking at address profiles has made me a bit uneasy… There are all kinds of labels and clustering setups, saying this is an institution, that is a whale, and over here is “smart money.” But honestly, on-chain is just a pile of addresses. After a cross-chain bridge switch, some stirring around on L2, and a few intermediary wallets, the profile feels like watching silhouettes through glass—there’s an outline, but all the details are guesswork. And some of the labels are inherently post-hoc: when prices rise, you get labeled as “smart,” and when prices fall, it’s said to be turnover.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve also been hearing discussions about a certain region’s added taxes and whether compliance is being tightened or loosened. Once expectations for in- and outflows change, the “motives” behind capital flows become even harder to read: it could be a shift in risk appetite, or it could simply be a change of routes, a change of the time window. From the chain it looks like a withdrawal, but in reality it’s waiting for the channels to be smoother.

These days, I’d rather treat the profiles as “signals” than evidence. Next time, I’m planning to focus only on a few flows that can be explained clearly: bridge in/out, abnormal L2 fees, fund movements before and after governance votes… To what extent do you usually trust address tags?