Alex Svanevik 🐧 Profile picture
Aug 26, 2021 17 tweets 5 min read Read on X
🧐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 And $400k withdrawn from Binance.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…

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More from @ASvanevik

Oct 6, 2023
Been asked about crypto going forward.

Below are 6 themes I think will play a role in the next cycle.

🧵
1/ Fintech frontend + crypto backend.

PayPal already has a stablecoin. Revolut lets you stake ETH.

And crypto startups like @basedappHQ already feel like fintech products.

Long-term, crypto replaces the backends for fintech.
2/ Gambling and betting.

Just makes a lot more sense with a DeFi backend. Instead of house taking a spread, it can live off the yields on capital.

L2s and account abstraction make apps more accessible to normies.

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Jan 7, 2023
How to scam people on @Airbnb - a quick guide.

(I know because I fell for it)
1. Create an ad that looks good, and make sure you leave out some information.

Add some fake reviews - note how these two guests coincidentally stayed with 2/2 same hosts 🤔
3. Immediately push guest to share phone number after they book:
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Dec 16, 2022
Some people don’t understand why we charge money for @nansen_ai.

Quick thread on why we charge:
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Voluntary contributions can work for a while, but it’s not sustainable.

VC money can pay for a while, but also not sustainable.
2. When users pay, the product has to be the best.

It sets a high bar for us.

I’m not interested in nice-to-have analytics. I want us to shoot for need-to-have.

We are top-right here: Image
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Nov 19, 2022
2.5% of all ETH is sitting in the Grayscale Trust yet no-one can find it on-chain?
I’m pretty sure @nansen_ai has the most complete tracking of Coinbase holdings. (Not perfect!)

CB is the custodian of Grayscale.

I see 4.85m ETH in CB wallets.

Assume 3m ETH of this is Grayscale.

That leaves only 1.85m ETH for other CB customers; 1/3rd of what Binance holds.
Given that CB has 1/8th the spot volume of Binance, holding 1/3rd the ETH reserves (excl. Grayscale) seems reasonable.

CB probably also has other large custody clients.

So: my guess is that the Grayscale ETH is already sitting in what we’ve tagged as CB in @nansen_ai.
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Nov 17, 2022
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Jul 8, 2022
Since he chose to reveal his identity, let me share a short story ...
In Dec 2020, I hopped on a call with Jason to demo Nansen. At the time I just knew he worked at Celsius.
When I demo Nansen, there's no script.

We just look at whatever's happening on the screen, because there's always something interesting to dig into.

But this time I had built a new feature: the Wallet Profiler.
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