🧐Time for a random exploratory wallet investigation.
Stream of consciousness - no idea where it takes us.
Background - was looking at top Coinbase Commerce merchants and came across this highly active merchant at the top:
That volume suggests it's not an individual, so I'm happy to explore it in public.
Hour-of-day activity indicates Asia-based:
That's a lot of USDC! Let's have a closer look at that
More than 45,000 wallets depositing USDC into it! Impressive.
Below are the top USDC depositors into the wallet.
Most are CB Commerce wallets (when customers pay them). But there's also a >$10m migration (?) from another wallet. And $400k withdrawn from Binance.
Now what about where the funds go?
Two main Binance deposit wallets, but also BlockFi, Huobi, Crypto .com, Coinbase, and more.
In total 169 destination addresses.
But who is this merchant? What do they sell?
One idea is to look at the distribution of prices. That might give us a clue.
Below are the most commonly used prices for their payment transactions.
$9, $14, $100, $1,000, ... - does this ring a bell?
could it be ...
buying a pack for the sake of science
hang on! mainly Asia-based and NBA Topshots seemed off.
the Topshots one is actually wallet #2 (not #1) on the merchant list. so still a useful discovery despite my error - lucky!
brb tagging NBA Top Shot deposit wallets to exchanges.
broadcast shall resume shortly.
wait how did I end up here?
OK, let me get somewhat back on track.
Pretty cool seeing NBA Top Shot collect USDC:
Looks like the NBA Top Shot team uses Kraken and Circle to off-ramp USDC. But will park that for now and go back to the #1 wallet.
The price distribution trick was quite useful.
Let's do that again - this time on the correct wallet.
It looks pretty weird tbh, with $475 as the most common price:
Literally just googling some of these uncommon numbers, like $585.09.
Bobcat Helium Miner??
BINGO.
Found a YouTube video where they describe how to order one of these miners.
I grabbed the receipt URL and confirmed the USDC goes to our target wallet. commerce.coinbase.com/receipts/WZ25R…
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.