About exchange address

[linuxqq]

I have seen many monitoring websites that can collect the address of the coinbase exchange. How do they do it?

[1713587096]

1713587096

[1713587096]

1713587096

[1713587096]

1713587096

[1713587096]

1713587096

[ranochigo]

Exchanges often consolidates their funds in several addresses and they are easily identified as they're either publicly known or if most of the funds that are sent to the address flows through a certain specific address.

By analysing the pattern of certain addresses (or rather transactions associated with the address) ;(whether they're consolidated together with other deposits, being sent to certain addresses down the line, etc), we can deduce with a relatively high degree of certainty that a specific address is a deposit address of a certain service.

[dansus021]

same like the ranochiho said there is pattern and if you see on block explorer like ethereum and binance smart chain you'll  see most of it already labeled so make analytic company easy to gather the data

actually you can see it when u deposited some coin to your exchange address, leave it for awhile and check your funds will go somewhere

[NotATether]

Exchange addresses tend to have a few inputs and several dozen outputs per transaction, such as this transaction from Binance addresses.

I believe most of these outputs are to external user addresses, and their exchange software could be batching many withdrawals into single transactions every couple of minutes.

[DaveF]

Years ago some exchanges published their cold wallet address as part of proof of funds. No idea if any still do that.
But having those addresses it was simple to see where the funds were coming from.

Some people had privacy concerns about it, others liked the proof of them having the BTC.
In the end it still did not matter as you could run with a cold wallet just as easy as the hot one.

Using the 'we got hacked' excuse just was not as simple.

-Dave

[ranochigo]

Years ago some exchanges published their cold wallet address as part of proof of funds. No idea if any still do that.
But having those addresses it was simple to see where the funds were coming from.

Some people had privacy concerns about it, others liked the proof of them having the BTC.
In the end it still did not matter as you could run with a cold wallet just as easy as the hot one.

Binance did publish their cold storage address (both on Bitcoin and Ethereum) and are still actively using it. It is just too easy to deduce which addresses belongs to which exchange; create a few accounts and send a few deposits. Check the transaction paths of each deposit and watch for intersections, and those are the main addresses being used by the exchange. No difference if they declare it or not. Services can still directly send user's deposit for another user's withdrawals which can be slightly more complicated.

Using the 'we got hacked' excuse just was not as simple.

It's a proof of solvency, which is just avoiding another Mt Gox.

I forgot to mention, BitMex has a vanity multisig. Which gives you some indication that they're from Bitmex. Not 100% accurate as with any analysis out there.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Years ago some exchanges published their cold wallet address as part of proof of funds. No idea if any still do that.

In terms of Coinbase as OP was asking about, they used to do this, and had a number of publicly known and identified cold wallet addresses, each holding several tens of thousands of bitcoin. Then, a couple of years ago, they underwent the process of upgrading their cold storage, and split all the funds from these handful of addresses across thousands of new addresses, in denominations down to a few bitcoin. Because of this, it is now essentially impossible to track down every address Coinbase are using for cold storage.

Here is another post I made about this a while ago, with a link to their old cold storage addresses which you can see being sequentially split up: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5331558.msg56818026#msg56818026

[PrimeNumber7]

Years ago some exchanges published their cold wallet address as part of proof of funds. No idea if any still do that.

In terms of Coinbase as OP was asking about, they used to do this, and had a number of publicly known and identified cold wallet addresses, each holding several tens of thousands of bitcoin. Then, a couple of years ago, they underwent the process of upgrading their cold storage, and split all the funds from these handful of addresses across thousands of new addresses, in denominations down to a few bitcoin. Because of this, it is now essentially impossible to track down every address Coinbase are using for cold storage.

As bad as Coinbase is for things such as closing accounts for arbitrary reasons and asking for intrusive information, not using a single cold wallet address means that customers have privacy from the general public. Governments can ask if an address belongs to Coinbase, but Johnny Random cannot and Coinbase can impose standards for releasing information when requests are not made via some kind of court order.

The above is superior to most other exchanges. There are drawbacks of course, such as being unable to verify the amount of coin they have.