---
title: Wash-trade flags
summary: Four plain rules mark sales that are probably one person trading with themselves. Flagged sales stay visible, labelled, and are left out of market statistics.
published: 2026-09-21
updated: 2026-09-21
---
## In one sentence

A sale is flagged when the same person is probably on both sides of it; flagged sales are still shown, with the reason, but they never count towards volume, prices, rankings or indexes.

## Why

A wash trade inflates volume, props up a price, or manufactures a "hot" list. On a zero-fee venue it costs only the network fee, so it happens.

## The four rules

Applied over the last 30 days, to inscription sales and rune sales:

| Rule | What it means |
| --- | --- |
| `self` | The buyer and seller are the same address. |
| `round_trip` | The same item goes from A to B and then back from B to A. For runes: the same rune both ways between the same two wallets within 7 days. |
| `repeat_pair` | The same two wallets trade with each other 3 or more times, **in both directions**. One direction only is a collector buying a seller's listings, which is ordinary. |
| `seller_funded` | The buyer's payment includes coins from the seller's own address: the seller paid for their own sale. Read from the transaction on our node, for listing trades only. |

Known marketplaces, pools and desks are exempt from the pair rules, because a pool trades with the same wallets all day, legitimately (see [who a trade was with](/methodology/venues)).

## What a flag changes

Flagged sales are left out of: hot lists, flipper rankings, trait premiums, underpriced-sale alerts, collection medians, rune prices and Greeks, pool comparisons and the market indexes. They still appear in sale lists and CSV downloads, with the rule that flagged them.

## Known limits

- The rules catch the plain cases. Someone careful, using many wallets funded from different places, can avoid them.
- A flag is a label about a pattern of transactions, not an accusation. Two genuine people can trade back and forth.

## How to check it yourself

Each flagged sale shows its rule and its transaction id. The addresses and the funding inputs are visible on any block explorer.