Who owns a wallet? Public tags vs guesses
Where wallet names come from, why most whales stay anonymous, and why custody hides much of a treasury.
Names come from public tags
Some wallets carry a public name tag on Etherscan, such as the Ethereum Foundation, a fund, or a government seizure address. When Deep Blue Alpha shows an owner name, it comes from those public tags. Everything else stays an address.
Never guess identities
Matching a wallet to a person from patterns, timing or social posts is guesswork and can harm real people. A label like “exchange” or “DEX router” describes what an address does, not who someone is.
Tagged wallets aren’t the whole treasury
Public companies that hold ETH usually keep most of it with custodians, in wallets nobody has publicly tagged. So a company’s tagged wallets show some of its moves, not its total holdings. That is why the treasury page puts the company’s own reported figure next to the on-chain view.
Try it on a live page
- Compare one company’s reported ETH with the ETH in its tagged wallets.
- Read the custody note on its wallet page. Why is there a gap?
- Open Well-known wallets and find where each name comes from.
Check yourself
1. Owner names on Deep Blue Alpha come from…
2. A company reports far more ETH than its tagged wallets hold. The likeliest reason is…
3. Labeling an anonymous wallet with a person’s name based on timing patterns is…
Go deeper
How to Track ETH ETF Holdings On-Chain: A 2026 Guide →Crypto Privacy vs. Transparency: The Whale Tracker’s Dilemma [Complete Guide] →Describes past on-chain activity and how our data is built. Not investment advice. Method details: data methodology.
