Real holders (Labs)
0.9.53How many owners, not addresses, hold each collection we follow, worked out from how addresses spend together, as a range with what it can't see.
In one sentence
Addresses the blockchain shows belong together (coins spent together, a buyer's coins, a wallet's address pair and, more weakly, funding) are grouped into owners, so each collection we follow gets an owner count, as a range, next to its address count.
What it is
A Labs experiment. A holder count on a collection page counts addresses, and one person with five wallets counts as five. Here the same addresses are grouped into owners, using links the blockchain itself shows, and each collection gets an owner count next to its address count, and a top-10 share by owner next to the one by address. The card lists the collections with the biggest gap first.
Which collections
The same ones as the holder count on a collection page: collections someone here holds or watches, and the 50 with the most sales volume our node saw in 30 days, once our own ord index has answered for at least 90% of their members. Owners are re-read every day; the links between addresses are rebuilt every night.
How addresses are linked
Two kinds of link, read from transactions that touch an inscription or a rune and the ones that follow from them:
| Link | What it is | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Spent together | Two addresses' coins spent as inputs of one ordinary transaction. Only the owner of both keys can sign that. | strong |
| Buyer's coins | In a marketplace swap, the coins the buyer pays with all come from the buyer. | strong |
| Pair | A wallet's payment address and its Ordinals address signing together. | strong |
| Funding | A brand-new address paid by an address we already follow, in a plain payment with at most two outputs, that then uses Ordinals within about a day (144 blocks). | weak |
Links never come from CoinJoins, from coordinated flows that pay a marketplace's fee address, from inscription services' reveals, from transactions with more than 50 inputs, or through an address labelled as a marketplace, exchange or fee wallet: those would join strangers. A group that would grow past 10,000 addresses is refused and logged.
The range
- Owners, the higher count: strong links only. We are confident the true number is not much higher than this unless wallets never spend together (below).
- Owners, the lower count: strong and weak links. A funding link can join two people, for example someone paying a friend, so this is the low end, not the answer.
- An address our links have never seen counts as its own owner. Unknown never merges anything.
The top-10 share by owner and the fewest owners holding over half the collection (the Nakamoto coefficient) use the strong links only, so they are never pushed up by a weak link.
Worked example. 100 items. One person holds 10 on each of 5 addresses that have spent together; 50 other people hold one each. By address: 55 holders, the top 10 hold 55%, and it takes 6 addresses to pass half. By owner: 51 owners, the top 10 hold 59%, and it takes 2.
What it can't see
- Wallets that never spend together. Someone who keeps two wallets apart and never moves coins between them looks like two owners. The owner count can still be too high; it is never lower than the true number because of this.
- Custody. An exchange or marketplace that holds items for many people at one address counts as one owner.
- Time. Links are rebuilt nightly and owners re-read daily, so this is yesterday's picture.
Privacy
The card and its API return counts only: no address, and no way to tell which addresses were grouped together. The grouping stays on our own machine.
Also as plain Markdown. See every methodology page.
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