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When it comes to exchanges, Coinbase cannot be avoided. Most domestic users may not be familiar with this US-based exchange, or have only heard of the name, but this old-fashioned US-compliant exchange not only occupies the top spot in the US digital currency trading market all year round, but also The darling of the traditional capital market. According to the data disclosed by it, since its establishment in 2012, Coinbase has more than 30 million users, and the cumulative transaction volume has reached more than 150 billion US dollars. Because a large part of its customers are from the United States, Coinbase attaches great importance to compliance issues. In 2017, it obtained the BitLicense license issued by the New York Financial Services Agency, becoming the second exchange to obtain this license. The special license for digital currency transactions issued by the regulatory authority in the center of the financial world is very demanding, and so far, less than 20 companies have been approved. Being able to obtain this license means that the institution's transaction data, system security and other aspects have been recognized by the licensing agency and will be subject to regular inspections. Therefore, it is not only difficult to falsify the trading volume of compliant exchanges, but also the system security has been tested and certified.

According to CoinMarketCap data, more than 40% of the trading volume on Coinbase comes from BTC-related trading pairs. BTC trading can be considered as one of the most important businesses of Coinbase, so Coinbase also attaches great importance to the security of the BTC account system, even its Bitcoin wallet The system is very different from other exchanges. Unlike the relatively fixed wallet clusters of most exchanges, Coinbase uses a large number of one-time wallets as recharge wallets and hot wallets, and its cold wallet storage is very scattered, so it is difficult to conduct data mining. Most of the current data service agencies cannot provide Coinbase-related account identification and fund flow tracking. A few agencies that can provide Coinbase account-related data, such as WhaleAlert, do not provide detailed wallet balance and transfer data, only sporadic large-value transfer warnings . Chain.info has effectively identified Coinbase’s BTC account system through artificial intelligence-assisted data mining, filling a big gap in the market.

So is exchange wallet mining tracking so difficult that accurate data is so rare? Let us briefly understand the exchange wallet system below. Exchange wallets are generally divided into three types: deposit wallets, hot wallets and cold wallets. The wallet mentioned here is actually an account of digital currency such as Bitcoin.

Deposit Wallet

hot wallet

hot wallet

cold wallet

cold wallet

Cold wallet refers to the offline wallet of the exchange. In the daily transactions of the exchange, some funds will be deposited (after the user deposits into the wallet, they will not withdraw it for a period of time), or after a certain amount of funds have been accumulated in the hot wallet, they will be transferred to the cold wallet address uniformly. In the normal process, the cold wallet will only interact with the hot wallet, and will not have direct interaction with ordinary deposit addresses. The exchange will physically isolate the private key of the cold wallet (disconnected from the network, or even shut down), so that the possibility of hacker attacks is eliminated during most of the offline time of the cold wallet.

The above is the wallet structure of most exchanges, but in Coinbase's account system, every part is different. The overall structure of Coinbase's recharge wallet is similar to that of most exchanges, but its recharge wallet can be replaced, and users can use a one-time address to recharge. This design improves wallet security, but also brings a lot of extra difficulty to data mining. Compared with ordinary exchanges, which only have 10-30 hot wallets, Coinbase uses a hot wallet library containing a large number of addresses. Most of these hot wallets will only be used once (only transfer-in and transfer-out transactions). . This leads to a large increase in the number of hot wallets, and there is not much history to trace. In addition, most exchanges only have a few addresses with huge amounts (above 20,000 BTC) as cold wallets, while Coinbase has constructed a cold wallet library consisting of many addresses with smaller amounts (8,000~10,000 BTC).

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Source：Chain.info

Chain.info has found nearly 300 cold wallets belonging to Coinbase through advanced algorithms, most of which are less than 10,000 BTC. Judging from the total bitcoin balance on the chain, the total BTC balance in the Coinbase wallet system is nearly 1 million, which is equivalent to about 8.4 billion US dollars at current prices (the latest price of BTC before press time is 8677.67 US dollars), much higher than that of Huobi and Coin An's 310,000 and 250,000 are currently the number one exchange for on-chain assets.

At present, most on-chain data service providers are unable to provide Coinbase data, which also shows that Coinbase's design achieves the effect of improving wallet security and privacy. Chain.info is currently the only platform on the market that provides relatively complete wallet data for Coinbase. The current data has been updated to the official website exchange leaderboard (https://chain.info/exchanges) and rich list (https://chain.info/exchanges). info/richlist), Coinbase wallet balance changes, inflows and outflows, and large-value transfers are also online on Chain.info’s official website and API services. Welcome to check it out. I believe that after adding this piece of the puzzle, the transparency of Bitcoin circulation will rise to a new level, and friends who are interested in blockchain data and wallet address mining are welcome to pay attention to Chain.info.