Daily Active Addresses

An address is an identifier derived from a cryptographic key or a contract deployment. Counting the distinct addresses that appear in a day is the cheapest available proxy for how many participants touched the chain. It is a count of identifiers, not of accounts, wallets, or people, and nothing in the protocol links an address to an individual.

How it is computed

count of distinct addresses appearing as sender or recipient in confirmed transactions over the trailing 24 hours

Where it misleads

An active address is not a person and not a user. One individual can generate unlimited addresses at no cost, while a single exchange hot wallet can represent millions of customers behind one address, so identical user bases produce wildly different counts on a self-custody chain and on an exchange-heavy chain. Bots, spam campaigns and airdrop farming create addresses that transact once and never return, and low fees make manufacturing them cheap enough to move a chain's headline number materially. Providers differ on whether contract addresses count, whether an address must send or may merely receive, and on UTXO chains whether wallet-generated change addresses are included, so published counts for the same chain and day often disagree.

The equity comparison, and why it fails

Daily active users. The analogy fails because a software product authenticates an account it controls, while a blockchain observes only key material that anyone can generate in unlimited quantity and that custodians deliberately pool.

Reading a high or a low value

A higher count means more distinct addresses interacted with the chain that day and a lower count means fewer. Any inference about the number of people involved requires evidence the metric itself cannot supply.