Glossary: Identity Resolution
Identity resolution links sessions, accounts, and wallet addresses into a unified analytical identity using explicit or probabilistic evidence while recording confidence, consent, and privacy limitations.
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
Audience | Use Case |
|---|---|
Analytics and data teams | Deduplicate users across wallets, devices, and sessions to produce accurate counts, retention, and attribution |
Growth and marketing teams | Build complete user views so campaigns target people, not fragments of them |
Product teams | Understand true multi-wallet user behavior instead of treating each address as a separate user |
Examples
An analytics platform links a user’s browsing sessions to their wallet the moment they connect, joining pre-connect attribution with onchain activity.
A token-gated form captures a verified email and Twitter handle against a wallet address, enriching the unified profile.
A team discovers its 50,000 active wallets resolve to roughly 30,000 actual users once multi-wallet behavior is stitched.
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 profiles, Wallet Clustering, Wallet Profiles, Unique Active Wallets, and the wallet and web analytics guide.
FAQs
Why is identity resolution hard in Web3?
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 are used to resolve identity?
Wallet connections within sessions, identify events from apps, form submissions linking emails and socials to addresses, onchain links like funding patterns, and verified social attestations.
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 does identity resolution improve attribution?
It connects the offchain journey, the ad click and site visit, to the onchain conversion by the same person, even across devices and wallets.
What tools perform identity resolution for Web3?
Wallet intelligence platforms like Formo unify wallet addresses with offchain identifiers like sessions, emails, and socials into single user profiles.
Related Terms
A/B Testing
An experiment that compares two versions of a page, feature, or campaign to see which performs better.
Account Abstraction
Account abstraction is an approach that turns blockchain accounts into programmable smart contract wallets, enabling features like gasless transactions, social recovery, session keys, and paying fees in any token.
Activation Rate
Activation rate is the percentage of new users or wallets that complete a key activation milestone, such as a first transaction, out of all users who signed up or connected within a given period.
Active Users
Active users are distinct users, accounts, visitors, wallets, or wallet clusters that complete a defined meaningful action during a specified period; the chosen identity unit and activity rule determine the result.
The data platform onchain apps
Get actionable analytics and attribution for crypto and DeFi.
The data platform for onchain apps. Stay up to date with product updates and industry insights.
Platform
Use cases