Intermediate level
A public blockchain address is a permanent, searchable record of every balance, trade and counterparty, and of the times you are active. It carries no name, but one link, such as an exchange withdrawal, an ENS name or a payment to a friend, attaches your identity to all of it, past and future. For most people, privacy is separation: different addresses for different purposes, and never letting a public address touch your savings.
What anyone can see
A public blockchain is a ledger anyone can read, forever, for free. Paste an address into a block explorer and a stranger sees what you would see.
| What is visible | What it tells an observer |
|---|---|
| Balances | Every token and NFT at the address, and what they are worth right now |
| Full history | Every transfer in and out since the address was created, with amounts |
| Counterparties | Which exchanges, protocols and people you pay and are paid by |
| Timing | When you are active, which hints at your time zone and routine |
| Positions | Your loans, liquidity and stakes, including the price at which a loan would be liquidated |
| NFTs and badges | Communities you belong to and events you attended |
| Names | An ENS or SNS name, and any records attached to it: avatar, social handles, website |
None of this carries your name, and it does not need to. The address is a pseudonym, and a pseudonym holds only until one link ties it to a person. From then on, the whole history, past and future, belongs to that person.
How an address gets linked to you
Links rarely come from clever analysis. Mostly they come from ordinary actions.
- Exchange withdrawals. An exchange that verified your identity knows every address you withdraw to and deposit from. That is expected, but it makes your privacy only as good as its data security. A June 2020 breach of Ledger’s online store database exposed about 1.1 million email addresses and 272,853 order records with names, postal addresses and phone numbers, later dumped publicly. In May 2025, Coinbase disclosed that criminals who bribed support staff had taken data on some customers, including names, addresses, ID images and snapshots of account balances and transaction history.
- Names. Setting an ENS or SNS name as your primary name, the reverse record, labels the address in every app that reads it. Add your real name, face or social handle to its records and you have published the link yourself. See name services.
- Posting an address. A donation address in a bio, a wallet screenshot, a tip jar, proof of holdings in a group chat.
- Paying people. Every friend, freelancer or merchant you pay learns your address, and with it your balance and your history.
- Dusting. Tiny unsolicited amounts sent to many addresses, so that spending them alongside other coins links your addresses together on UTXO chains such as Bitcoin. See wallet dusting.
- Services that see your traffic. Every site you connect a wallet to sees your address and your IP address together. Some wallet features, such as transaction simulation, also run through the provider’s servers, as MetaMask notes in its own documentation.
How addresses are clustered
Once one address is linked, others follow through a handful of well known heuristics that analytics firms and hobbyists apply at scale.
| Heuristic | What gives it away |
|---|---|
| Common funding | A new address whose first ETH or SOL for gas came from an address already linked to you |
| Direct transfers | Moving funds between your own wallets, in either direction |
| Shared deposit address | Two wallets that both send to the same personal exchange deposit address |
| Common inputs (Bitcoin) | Coins from several addresses spent in one transaction are presumed to share an owner |
| Timing and amounts | A withdrawal of 2.5 ETH from an exchange, followed minutes later by 2.5 ETH arriving elsewhere |
| Behavior | The same unusual tokens, the same protocols, the same active hours |
A worked example: you withdraw 3 ETH from an exchange to address A, then send 0.02 ETH from A to each of two fresh addresses, B and C, to pay for gas. Anyone who knows A now knows B and C, and the exchange, which knows A is yours, can follow the same trail. B and C were never posted anywhere, yet nothing about them is hidden. The guide to following funds shows how analysts do this in practice.
Practical separation
For most people the goal is not anonymity. It is keeping your public identity and your savings apart, so someone who learns one does not automatically learn the other.
Public wallet
Fine to be linked to you
- Holds your ENS name, the NFTs you show, your community activity
- Receives payments from people who know you
- Funding your vault, or being funded by it
- Holding more than you are comfortable being seen
Private vault
Never linked in public
- Funded from an exchange withdrawal or another unlinked address
- No name, no NFTs, no social activity
- Any direct transfer to or from the public wallet
- Being used to prove holdings to anyone
- Fresh addresses per purpose. One for your public identity, one for the vault, one for trying new apps, and new ones when a purpose changes. On Bitcoin, wallets already generate a new receive address each time. Use it rather than reusing an old one.
- Retire a doxxed address from savings. Once an address has been tied to your name, treat it as public for good, and stop building a savings balance there.
- Break the gas link. Where you can, fund a new address with its first gas from an exchange withdrawal rather than from a wallet already linked to you.
- Consolidate deliberately. Sweeping several addresses into one merges their histories in public. On Bitcoin, coin control lets you choose which coins a transaction spends, so dust and unrelated coins are not spent together.
- Share less. Screenshots crop badly. If you ever need to prove holdings, use an address created for that purpose.
This fits naturally with a tiered wallet setup: the vault that rarely signs is also the address nobody sees.
Visible wealth and physical safety
Most crypto crime happens online. The exception is the kind where privacy is the whole defense. Reported physical attacks on crypto holders, robberies and kidnappings aimed at forcing a transfer, reached their highest level in 2025 in the public log maintained by security researcher Jameson Lopp, which records attacks back to 2014.
The chain of events is usually short. Someone is identified as a holder through something they posted, a leaked customer list or a named address, and a public address makes the size of the prize easy to check. Breaking that chain at the first link is the most effective thing you can do.
Privacy technology, described plainly
Separation is a habit. Some technologies aim to make privacy a property of the system rather than of your discipline. They work in different ways and come with different practical and legal considerations.
| Approach | How it works | Examples | What to know |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private by default | Sender, receiver and amount are hidden for every transaction | Monero | Balances are not publicly visible, so showing your history to someone such as an accountant means sharing a view key with them |
| Optional shielding | Funds can stay public or move into a shielded pool that uses zero knowledge proofs | Zcash | Privacy depends on how many people use the shielded pool |
| Stealth addresses | You publish one reusable code, and each payer derives a fresh, unlinkable address for their payment | ERC-5564 on Ethereum, silent payments (BIP 352) on Bitcoin | Hides who received a payment, not that it happened; funding it from a linked wallet undoes the benefit |
| Privacy pools | Deposits and withdrawals are unlinked with zero knowledge proofs, and a withdrawal proves its deposit is in an approved set | Privacy Pools by 0xbow on Ethereum, launched March 31, 2025 | A deposit the association set provider does not approve can still be recovered, but only publicly, by the original depositor |
| Mixers | Many users pool funds and withdraw to new addresses | Tornado Cash | Legal treatment has changed repeatedly; see below |
Stealth addresses are the most everyday of these. Under ERC-5564, a recipient publishes a stealth meta-address; each sender combines it with a random one time key to create a new address only the recipient can find and spend from. Bitcoin’s silent payments do the same with no extra notification transaction, at the cost of the recipient’s wallet scanning the chain to find its payments. Both solve the donation address problem: you can publish one address without exposing everything paid to it.
A plain rule keeps all of this lawful: privacy is legitimate, laundering is not. Protecting your savings, salary or safety is a different act from hiding the proceeds of a crime, and the law treats it differently. The rules vary by country and have moved fast. The US Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022; a federal appeals court ruled against those sanctions in November 2024, and Treasury lifted them in March 2025, while prosecutors in the US and the Netherlands separately brought criminal cases against its developers. Check the rules where you live before using any of these tools.
Audit your own footprint
Look yourself up
Paste each of your addresses into a block explorer, as a stranger would. Note the balances, the names, any labels the explorer has attached and the NFTs on display. The explorer router opens the right explorer for any address.
Map the links
For each address, check where its first funds and gas came from and where it has sent money. Sketch which addresses connect to each other and which connect to your name.
Check your names
Look at the primary name and records of any ENS or SNS name you own. Remove records that tie it to your identity if you no longer want that link, remembering that old records stay visible in the history.
Search for yourself
Search your addresses and names on social platforms and search engines. Old posts are the most common leak.
Decide what to retire
A linked address stays linked. Keep it for public use and build savings in a fresh vault instead, without a direct transfer that joins the two. Routing through your own exchange account breaks the direct public link, though the exchange sees both sides and matching amounts and timing can still hint at it.
Common questions
Can someone find out who I am from my wallet address?
Not from the address alone. They can from any link between the address and you: a name record, a post, a payment to someone who knows you, or data from an exchange. Once one link exists, clustering can connect other addresses to the first, so a single slip can expose more than one wallet.
Does using a new address for every transaction make me anonymous?
No. It stops casual observers from seeing everything in one place, but if the new addresses are funded from or send to each other, they cluster back together. Fresh addresses help only when the links between them are kept apart as well.
Is it legal to use privacy tools?
In many places, protecting your financial privacy is lawful, and the law distinguishes it from concealing the proceeds of crime. Specific tools have faced sanctions and prosecutions, and the rules differ by country and change over time. Check the rules where you live, keep records of your own funds, and expect exchanges to ask questions about funds that passed through a mixer.
Should I remove my ENS name?
Not necessarily. A name is useful on a public wallet, where being recognized is the point. The problem is a name on the address that holds your savings, or records that tie the name to your real identity. Keep names on public wallets and keep the vault unnamed.
Does an exchange know what I do after I withdraw?
It knows the address you withdrew to, and because the chain is public it can follow what that address does next, just as anyone can. Exchanges and analytics firms routinely screen activity linked to their customers. Assume anything your withdrawal address does is visible to the exchange that funded it.
Where to go next
Next: Getting a good fill: slippage, price impact and routing
Guide 5 of 16 in the Intermediate level. Your place is kept on this device, so you can pick up exactly here next time.