The main problem of researchers in such assessments is that wallets can not always be identified unambiguously, Zuborev recalled. Whether the movement of funds was a full—fledged withdrawal for an over-the-counter transaction or a simple transfer to a new unidentified crypto exchange wallet for “cold storage” is unclear. Therefore, it is worth being skeptical about the data of on-chain research, the expert believes.
The same opinion is shared by the head of the ICB Fund investment department, Aaron Chomsky. He noted that the reliability of such information raises big questions. On-chain analytics services cannot guarantee 100% accuracy, which is often indicated in the disclaimer themselves, the expert says.
He explained that the complexity of the process lies in the correct marking of wallets:
often information about the address belonging to a particular exchange or another major player appears late. As a result, many new addresses may not be taken into account, the specialist said.
He noted that this is why you should not trust various trackers of “whale” transactions, like Uniwhales, since many intra-exchange transactions may look like the interaction of an exchange address with some unknown wallet. So there are theories that some whale brought a large volume of coins to the site for sale or brought them out for the purpose of long-term holding, Chomsky explained.
The expert is sure that it is not necessary to draw conclusions based on such data. Exchanges can have a lot of wallets, including for over-the-counter trading: as strange as it may sound, many crypto exchanges provide such a service, the specialist said.
It should be borne in mind that centralized platforms are still the main sources of liquidity for speculation, and this is the main real way of using cryptocurrencies at the moment, says Khosmky. According to him, we can talk about an increase in the number of people who want to accumulate coins for a long time outside of exchanges, but, most likely, due to the complexity of the digital infrastructure, it is no longer possible to track the balances of exchanges, relying only on outdated wallet data.