Arkham

Our assessment

Arkham's focus is attribution: linking wallet clusters to named real-world entities, and making that searchable. Its exploration tools are free, which is unusual in a category where the equivalent data costs four figures a month.

Deanonymisation as a product

The premise is that public blockchains are public, and that identifying who is behind an address is legitimate analysis. It is also surveillance infrastructure, and its existence is a reason privacy-conscious users behave the way they do. Both statements are true, and a reader deciding whether to use it should hold them together rather than pick one.

Attribution confidence is not uniform

Some links are near-certain — a labelled exchange deposit address, a publicly announced treasury. Others are probabilistic clustering that can be wrong, and a wrong attribution presented with a confident label is worse than no label. Check what a specific attribution actually rests on before building a conclusion on it.

Free access changes who can use it

Charging nothing for exploration means journalists, researchers and individual users can investigate flows that would otherwise require an institutional budget. That has produced genuine public-interest findings. Our evidence check still found fourteen indicators with nothing published at conventional addresses, mostly pricing and terms.

Who it suits

Arkham fits anyone investigating specific flows — a hack, a treasury, a large transfer — and researchers who need entity context. Traders looking for market structure rather than identity should use Glassnode or CryptoQuant instead.