🧪Project Research
This is an outline of common steps for introductory project research. It begins assuming you know the token you want to look at and have some basic documentation -- possibly with initial allocations or similar -- available. If you do not have any documentation at all that is fine but you're going to need to invent your own labels to get started (i.e. rather than calling something "treasury allocation" it is just going to be "large holder 1").
Setup
This example looks at Ethereum and Orbler (ORBR) with this documentation.
The first place to check is the wallet tag data to see what we already have.
Monthly flows
Start from this dashboard to get monthly on-chain volumes. This will help narrow down the time frame (or frames) to start with.
Now we know the initial period is in February and maybe March 2022.
Largest senders and receivers
Candidate "important wallet" addresses are easily found here. Note that, because we do not know exactly what happened or when it happened, that these are just candidates and we want to aim broadly with the time frame.
Working out the wallets
From those tables we can see that 0xf8db5580cdcb77119c753f149eb91b815ee006e0 is the issuance wallet. Why?
It receives the full 2 billion from null
It sends all 2b out and never receives any more.
Some amounts match the allocations.
On the last point we are going to split up the outflows later. It is normal to need 2 or 3 layers of wallets to find everything. For example airdrops are often run out of a separate wallet with hundreds or even thousands of small destinations.
The outflows are:
| address | amount |
|---|---|
0x58e33934411f8e453b5cb04c498d194d01b3fad8 | 960,000,000.00 |
0x78b4964bf6cbc618e340aac960f8bc61c06434ff | 400,000,000.00 |
0x8ff19db5b7d712b98026acf692793d47dceece56 | 220,000,000.00 |
0xeb926db328044c0cdb8c5fbcf1bd3649d8cd4b57 | 200,000,000.00 |
0x6f0df17a5872c14492ff7ce8d305ba0cdd22cb11 | 200,000,000.00 |
0xcb7f80a4d3fa609cc3acd2a018547a9e8ec56548 | 20,000,000.00 |
Compare this to a stated allocation of:
| label | amount |
|---|---|
marketing | 20mm |
sale | 300mm |
team | 140mm |
partner & advisor | 20mm |
liquidity / staking | 400mm |
treasury | 1120mm |
This means we are going to need to do a little guesswork to figure things out.
Treasury
0x58e33934411f8e453b5cb04c498d194d01b3fad8 receives 960mm from the issuance wallet and enough to make up the difference to 1120mm from two other wallets given above:
| address | amount |
|---|---|
0x78b4964bf6cbc618e340aac960f8bc61c06434ff | 100mm |
0x6f0df17a5872c14492ff7ce8d305ba0cdd22cb11 | 60mm |
Sale
Net of the 100mm above this leaves 300mm in 0x78b4964bf6cbc618e340aac960f8bc61c06434ff. That makes it a good candidate to be the "sale" wallet. And if we look at that wallet this looks correct. The other recipients are not addresses we already know.
This may take a bit more checking to confirm but it is a good candidate.
Liquidity & staking
0x8ff19db5b7d712b98026acf692793d47dceece56 receives 220mm from treasury and 180mm from 0xeb926db328044c0cdb8c5fbcf1bd3649d8cd4b57. That is 400mm.
It distributes a long tail of 8.33mm chunks, 17.36mm to 0x833b0f56ea206df8ee784fa115c42ecdf00e3f08 and then a lot of 4mm and down amounts.
This looks like the liquidity and staking wallet.
Partner & advisor
0xeb926db328044c0cdb8c5fbcf1bd3649d8cd4b57 receives 200mm from treasury. It sends 180mm to 0x8ff19db5b7d712b98026acf692793d47dceece56 and then a lot of 1.11mm and 833k single payments.
That looks like paying related parties but could also be marketing expenses,
Team
0x6f0df17a5872c14492ff7ce8d305ba0cdd22cb11 receives 200mm from treasury. It sends 60mm to 0x58e33934411f8e453b5cb04c498d194d01b3fad8 and then another long tail of 7.77mm and other clearly-allocations-amounts.
This looks like the team wallet.
Marketing
0xcb7f80a4d3fa609cc3acd2a018547a9e8ec56548 deposits a bit to exchanges but still has the bulk of the initial 20mm tokens.
This looks like a partially-spent marketing budget. But it is also possible they just did not have as many partners as expected.
Notes
It is plausible we have the marketing and partner & advisor wallets backwards. That would mean they have incurred a lot of marketing expenses and stiffed (or never had) partners. It does not really matter which happened.
In more complex cases you may need to look downstream from these wallets. Or if it really matters which is marketing and which is the partner wallet we would need to look further. But for the purposes of an intro this is a reasonable place to stop.
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