How funding chains work

Every wallet starts empty. Something has to send it its first coins, usually native SOL or ETH to pay for fees. That first inbound transfer is the wallet's first funder, and it is the single most useful fact on the page.

A funding chain repeats the question. Who funded the first funder? And who funded that one? Each answer is a hop.

Where the climb stops

We keep climbing until we reach one of these:

  • A labelled exchange hot wallet, such as a Binance or OKX withdrawal wallet. Past that point the money belongs to an exchange's pooled funds, so the trail is the exchange account, not another wallet.
  • A labelled service wallet, such as a swap service.
  • A bridge or Relay, when the money arrived from another chain. Here we try to carry on across chains (see below).
  • A mesh bank, when a group of wallets passes money around inside itself and one wallet sits at the top.

The last card in the Funding Chain tab says which of these ended the trace. It shows the sender, the deposit address where there is one, and the transaction, in full. Sometimes the trace stops for another reason, for example because the next funder's history is too large to search quickly. In that case the card says so in red.

Reading a hop

Each hop card shows:

  • the chain, and how the money moved (a direct transfer, a bridge, Relay or NEAR Intents);
  • the sender and the receiver, as full addresses with their labels;
  • the amount, its US dollar value at the time, and the full transaction hash;
  • the date and time in UTC, and how long ago that was.

Hop 1 is always the wallet's own first funder. Higher numbers go further back in time.

Across chains

Money often crosses chains on its way to a wallet. A typical path: someone withdraws SOL from an exchange, bridges it through Relay, and receives ETH on Robinhood a few seconds later.

When a hop arrives through a bridge we know about, we look up the other side of that bridge transfer and keep climbing on the origin chain. Each hop carries its own chain badge, so a chain that starts on Robinhood and ends on Solana is easy to follow. We use:

  • Relay's request records, which pair the origin and destination legs of a transfer;
  • NEAR Intents status records;
  • known bridge contracts, such as the Across SpokePool.

When a bridge proves that two wallets on different chains belong together, the More info card lists the other one under Linked wallets on other chains, with the transaction that proves it.

What a funding chain does not prove

A shared funder is evidence, and some shared funders are much weaker evidence than others. Two wallets that both withdrew from Binance tell you almost nothing, since Binance pays out to a vast number of strangers. Two wallets funded by the same private wallet within four minutes of each other are a different matter.