On-Chain Analysis

On-chain analysis reads the blockchain itself rather than the price chart. Because these networks are public, you can observe things that have no equivalent in traditional markets: how much supply has not moved in years, what is sitting on exchanges, how much is staked, what fees people are willing to pay.

That visibility is genuinely useful and routinely over-interpreted. An address is not a person — one entity can control thousands, and a custodian can hold coins for millions of people in a handful. Coins moving to an exchange is not proof of intent to sell. Metrics built on heuristics about which addresses belong to whom inherit the errors in those heuristics, and different analytics providers frequently disagree about the same week.

So we report on-chain figures with the source named and the caveats attached, and we distinguish what is directly observable — a transaction, a balance, a fee — from what is estimated. Where a widely quoted indicator rests on an assumption, we say what the assumption is.

Coverage includes supply distribution and dormancy, exchange balances, miner behaviour and hash rate, staking participation, and fee pressure via gas. Our glossary defines the vocabulary, and the individual coin pages explain how each network's consensus and issuance work, which is what makes its on-chain data mean anything.

None of these metrics predict price, and pieces here carry the Priced at Publication stamp so you can see the market they were written into. Nothing in this section is financial advice.

A final caution on exchange balances specifically, because they are the most quoted on-chain metric and the most misread. Coins moving onto an exchange are often described as selling pressure, but the same flow happens when someone posts collateral, moves between products, or when a custodian reorganises its own wallets. The observation is real; the interpretation usually is not.