Glossary: Identity Resolution

What is Identity Resolution?

Identity resolution links sessions, accounts, and wallet addresses into a unified analytical identity using explicit or probabilistic evidence. It helps recognize returning activity and related wallets without assuming every address equals a person. Reliable systems preserve source, confidence, consent, and privacy limits so uncertain links are not presented as verified identity.

Identity Resolution Explained

One person might visit your site on their phone, return on a laptop, connect two different wallets, and join your Discord under a username. To your tools, that looks like five strangers.

Identity resolution stitches those fragments back into one person. It links sessions, wallets, and accounts using the connections between them, the same wallet seen in two browsers, an email tied to a wallet through a form, a verified social account.

Without it, your user counts are inflated, retention looks worse than it is, and attribution credits the wrong channels. With it, you finally see users instead of fragments.

What Identity Resolution Means For

Examples

1. An analytics platform links a user’s browsing sessions to their wallet the moment they connect, joining pre-connect attribution with onchain activity.

2. A token-gated form captures a verified email and Twitter handle against a wallet address, enriching the unified profile.

3. A team discovers its 50,000 active wallets resolve to roughly 30,000 actual users once multi-wallet behavior is stitched.

4. A protocol identifies that a whale’s three wallets belong to one entity, changing how concentration risk is reported.

Sessions, embedded wallets, and smart accounts

Returning sessions may connect to the same wallet, a different wallet, an embedded wallet, or a smart account. Resolution should preserve these identifiers and their relationships rather than overwrite them. A user-level view can group evidence while the address-level records remain available for auditing and wallet-specific analysis.

Confidence and privacy limitations

Explicit account links and verified ownership signals are stronger than behavioral similarity. Probabilistic links should include confidence and remain reversible. Identity resolution should use appropriate consent, minimize unnecessary personal data, and avoid claiming a real-world identity when the evidence only supports an analytical relationship.

Related reading

Explore Wallet Clustering, Wallet Profiles, Unique Active Wallets, and the wallet and web analytics guide.

FAQs

Why is identity resolution hard in crypto apps?

Users are pseudonymous and routinely use multiple wallets, devices, and browsers. There is no central account to anchor identity, so links must be built from observed connections.

What signals can support identity resolution?

Explicit account login, a user-authorized wallet connection, an identify event, or a verified form submission can link identifiers within a stated scope. Onchain co-funding or behavioral similarity may suggest a relationship but does not prove common ownership.

Is identity resolution the same as deanonymization?

No. The goal is unifying a user’s own fragmented identifiers for accurate analytics, not exposing who they are in the real world.

How can identity resolution support attribution?

A documented link between a campaign session, an app account, and a wallet can make an attributed journey measurable. It does not prove that the campaign caused the conversion, and the result covers only events that were successfully linked.

What should teams check in identity-resolution tools for crypto apps?

Check which identifiers are joined, whether links are explicit or inferred, how confidence and provenance are retained, and what deletion or correction controls exist. Treat inferred address clusters as uncertain relationships, not verified user identities.