Gas & Gas Funding

Transactions on Ethereum require paying fees known as “gas.” The network itself – the operators of the network – collect these fees in exchange for processing transactions.

Many custody providers including, but not limited to, exchanges, custodians, trust providers and other service providers offer facilities to “fund gas” for their clients.

For example a large custody provider will generally have one or more “gas funding addresses” which periodically make small transfers of ETH to addresses under their control to pay for administrative transactions and the like.

For large providers with many clients these addresses are generally well known. This is unsurprising as their entire customer base, plus many counterparties of their customer base, can see the transfers.

This makes attribution of custody/control to a service provider via these addresses reliable.

In the case of service providers which offer multiple services this process can be exceptionally reliable. For example if an address has gas funded by X’s gas funding address and that gas is routinely used to fund transfers to X’s exchange and no other exchanges then we can be extremely sure the custody address belongs to X.