New Address
The count of addresses that appear on a blockchain for the first time during a given period.
Generating a key pair costs nothing and leaves no record, so an address becomes visible only when it first receives or sends value; new address counts measure that first appearance. The series is used as a rough adoption proxy, and it is distorted by several ordinary practices. Bitcoin wallets conventionally generate a fresh address for every incoming payment for privacy reasons, exchanges create deposit addresses per customer and per asset, and eligibility farming ahead of a distribution creates addresses in bulk. As a result new addresses and new people can move in opposite directions, and the metric is most useful when read alongside entity-level estimates.
En pratique
A wallet that issues a new receiving address for each payment produces many new addresses for a single user over the course of a year.
Le malentendu courant
New addresses are not new people; privacy-preserving wallet defaults alone can generate hundreds of addresses for one user.