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e-commerce-and-crypto-payments-future
Blog

The Future of Attribution in a Multi-Wallet, Multi-Chain Ecosystem

Current attribution models are shattered by multi-chain users. We analyze the identity mapping problem, spotlight protocols like Safe and Across building connective tissue, and outline the new stack for revenue tracking.

introduction
THE DATA CRISIS

Introduction: The Attribution Black Hole

Current analytics tools fail to map user activity across wallets and chains, creating a blind spot for protocols and investors.

Attribution is broken. On-chain analytics from Nansen or Dune Analytics track addresses, not users. A single user operating ten wallets across Arbitrum and Base appears as ten distinct, low-value entities, obscuring their true engagement and capital.

Protocols misallocate resources. Without cross-wallet identity, airdrops and incentives target sybils over real users. This inefficiency drains protocol treasuries and distorts growth metrics, making projects like Uniswap and Aave overpay for illusory engagement.

The multi-chain reality exacerbates this. A user bridging USDC via Circle's CCTP from Ethereum to Avalanche and swapping on Trader Joe creates a fragmented journey. Current tools see three isolated transactions, not one cohesive user intent.

Evidence: Over 30% of active DeFi addresses are potential sybils, yet protocols allocate billions in incentives based on this flawed data layer.

deep-dive
THE DATA PIPELINE

Anatomy of the Identity Graph: Wallets, Bridges, and Smart Accounts

User identity is a composite signal assembled from fragmented on-chain activity across wallets and chains.

The identity graph is probabilistic. No single identifier like an EOA address is definitive. Attribution requires stitching activity from smart accounts (ERC-4337), bridged transactions (LayerZero, Wormhole), and intent-based swaps (UniswapX, Across) to form a cohesive user profile.

Smart accounts fragment the signal. ERC-4337 enables one user to deploy hundreds of counterfactual smart wallets. This breaks naive EOA-based tracking, forcing analysts to cluster accounts via social recovery modules and shared on-chain behavior patterns.

Cross-chain activity is the primary attribution tool. A user bridging from Arbitrum to Base via Stargate creates a deterministic link. Aggregators like Zerion and Arkham use these bridge events as anchor points to unify a user's multi-chain financial footprint.

Evidence: Over 5.6 million smart accounts have been deployed since ERC-4337's launch, but fewer than 15% are active, highlighting the noise in raw deployment data that must be filtered for meaningful attribution.

ON-CHAIN VS. OFF-CHAIN VS. HYBRID

The Attribution Stack: Protocol Solutions Compared

Comparison of technical approaches for tracking user acquisition and rewards in a fragmented multi-chain, multi-wallet environment.

Core Feature / MetricOn-Chain Native (e.g., EigenLayer, EAS)Off-Chain Aggregator (e.g., Hypernative, Gauntlet)Intent-Based Hybrid (e.g., UniswapX, Across)

Attribution Granularity

Wallet address only

Device ID, IP, wallet cluster

User intent signature

Cross-Chain Proof Portability

Real-Time Fraud Detection

Next block

< 1 sec

< 500 ms

Gas Cost per Attribution Event

$2-5

$0

$0.10-0.50

Requires Off-Chain Trust Assumption

Minimal (Solver)

Integration Complexity for dApps

High (new contracts)

Low (API/SDK)

Medium (intent standards)

Resistance to Sybil Attacks

Capital-based (stake)

Heuristic-based

Intent-graph analysis

Native Support for Multi-Wallet Users

protocol-spotlight
THE FUTURE OF ATTRIBUTION

Builder Spotlight: Protocols Weaving the Identity Fabric

In a world of multi-wallet users and fragmented chains, proving consistent identity and reputation is the new moat.

01

Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS): The Schemaless Reputation Primitive

EAS is not an identity protocol; it's a decentralized registry for any statement. Its power is in off-chain schemas, enabling custom attestations for DAO membership, credit scores, or KYC proofs without on-chain bloat.\n- Permissionless Schemas: Any entity (e.g., Optimism, Gitcoin) can define and issue attestations.\n- Portable Verifiability: Attestations are cryptographically signed, enabling trustless verification across dApps.

10M+
Attestations
Zero-Fee
Schema Creation
02

World ID: Proof-of-Personhood as a Global Sybil Resistance Layer

Worldcoin's core innovation is biometric proof of unique humanness, creating a global privacy-preserving identity layer. It solves the fundamental attribution problem of distinguishing one user from a million bots.\n- Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Users prove uniqueness without revealing biometric data.\n- Cross-Application Graph: A single proof can be reused across DeFi, governance (like Aave), and airdrops, collapsing user acquisition costs.

5M+
Verified Humans
~99.9%
Sybil Resistance
03

Lens Protocol: The Social Graph as Portable Identity

Lens reframes identity as a user-owned social graph. Your followers, posts, and interactions are composable NFTs that travel with you, making social capital a verifiable on-chain asset.\n- Composable Reputation: DApps can query the graph to gauge influence or trust, enabling under-collateralized lending or curated access.\n- Native Monetization: Identity is directly tied to creator economies, flipping the Web2 platform-owned model.

400k+
Profiles Minted
Polygon
Native Chain
04

Gitcoin Passport: Aggregating Web2 & Web3 Credentials

Passport tackles the cold-start problem for reputation by aggregating stamps from both worlds (e.g., BrightID, POAP, Twitter, Github). It uses a scoring mechanism to compute a trust score without a central authority.\n- Plural Identity: Resilience comes from multiple attestations, not one silver bullet.\n- Defense-in-Depth: Actively used by Gitcoin Grants and protocols like Uniswap for sybil-resistant quadratic funding and governance.

500k+
Passports
20+
Stamp Types
05

The Intractable Problem of Multi-Chain Reputation Aggregation

No single chain holds a user's complete history. True cross-chain reputation requires secure, trust-minimized state attestation between ecosystems.\n- The Oracle Problem: Bridging reputation requires oracles like Chainlink or light clients to attest to off-chain state, introducing new trust assumptions.\n- Fragmented Liquidity: A user's DeFi history on Arbitrum is invisible to a lender on Base, creating systemic inefficiency.

50+
Active L2s/L1s
$0
Native Solution
06

ERC-4337 & Smart Accounts: The Wallet as Your Identity Hub

Account Abstraction shifts identity from key pairs to smart contract wallets. This enables transaction-level attestations, social recovery, and sponsored gas—fundamentally changing how users are identified and onboarded.\n- Session Keys: Users can grant temporary, scoped authority to dApps (e.g., a gaming session), creating a richer interaction graph.\n- Bundler & Paymaster Graphs: Stackup or Biconomy infrastructure creates new data layers for analyzing user intent and reliability.

~10x
UX Improvement
Gasless
Onboarding
future-outlook
THE FUTURE OF ATTRIBUTION

The 2025 Attribution Stack: Predictions and Open Problems

A technical forecast of how user attribution will evolve to track value across wallets, chains, and abstracted transactions.

Universal Identity Graphs will win. Current attribution is siloed by wallet addresses. The 2025 standard is a cross-chain identity layer linking all user-controlled addresses (EOAs, AA wallets, L2s) into a single entity. This solves the multi-wallet problem for protocols like Jupiter and Uniswap.

Intent-based attribution creates new metrics. Abstracted transactions via UniswapX or CowSwap shift attribution from on-chain settlement to off-chain intent expression. The key metric becomes intent-to-fill rate, not final swap volume, requiring new data pipelines.

Cross-chain attribution demands new standards. Bridging via LayerZero or Axelar fragments user journeys. The solution is a canonical attribution event standard, similar to IBC's packet model, that propagates a source attribution tag through every hop and settlement.

Evidence: The rise of ERC-4337 Account Abstraction and EIP-6963 multi-wallet discovery are precursors to this graph. Without them, L2 growth fragments user data by 10x.

takeaways
ATTRIBUTION'S NEXT FRONTIER

TL;DR for Builders and Investors

Current attribution models are broken. The future is a standardized, privacy-preserving, and chain-agnostic system that captures the full user journey.

01

The Problem: Wallet-Centric Attribution is Dead

Tracking a single address is futile. Users have multiple wallets (e.g., MetaMask, Rabby, Phantom) and use intent-based solvers (e.g., UniswapX, CowSwap) that abstract the user. You're missing >80% of the journey.

  • Key Benefit 1: Acknowledges the reality of fragmented user identity.
  • Key Benefit 2: Forces a shift from address-based to behavior-based analytics.
>80%
Journey Obfuscated
5-10x
Wallets per User
02

The Solution: Universal Attribution Graphs

A shared, open graph that links pseudonymous identities across wallets and chains via behavioral fingerprints and zero-knowledge proofs. Think EigenLayer AVS for attribution.

  • Key Benefit 1: Enables cross-DApp, cross-chain loyalty and rewards programs.
  • Key Benefit 2: Creates a new data primitive for underwriting and on-chain credit.
100+
Chain Support
ZK-Proofs
Privacy Layer
03

The Business Model: Sell the Shovel, Not the Gold

The winning protocol will be infrastructure, not an analytics dashboard. It will offer a standardized SDK (like Segment for web3) and monetize via micro-transactions for graph queries and attestations.

  • Key Benefit 1: Captures value from all builders needing attribution, not just one vertical.
  • Key Benefit 2: Aligns with the modular stack; integrates with oracles (Chainlink), rollups (Arbitrum, Optimism), and bridges (LayerZero, Across).
SDK First
Distribution
Pay-per-Query
Monetization
04

The Privacy Mandate: ZK-Proofs or Bust

Raw transaction graphs are a privacy nightmare and regulatory liability. The only viable solution uses zero-knowledge proofs to attest to behavior (e.g., "user bridged >$1k") without revealing the full history.

  • Key Benefit 1: Enables compliance-ready analytics (e.g., proof of human, proof of jurisdiction).
  • Key Benefit 2: Prevents the system from becoming a surveillance tool, preserving crypto's ethos.
zk-SNARKs
Tech Stack
0 Raw Data
Exposed
05

The Killer App: On-Chain AdTech & Referrals

The first major use case is rebuilding digital advertising without platforms. Smart contracts can pay out fees automatically based on proven attribution, enabling trustless affiliate programs and performance-based ad auctions.

  • Key Benefit 1: Unlocks $10B+ in ad spend currently inaccessible to on-chain apps.
  • Key Benefit 2: Removes intermediaries, driving >50% more value to creators and referrers.
$10B+
Addressable Market
>50%
Efficiency Gain
06

The Protocol to Watch: EigenLayer & AVS Dynamics

Don't build the graph from scratch. The winning team will deploy an Actively Validated Service (AVS) on EigenLayer, leveraging restaked ETH to secure the attribution graph and bootstrap cryptoeconomic security from day one.

  • Key Benefit 1: Instant security with $15B+ in restaked TVL.
  • Key Benefit 2: Creates a powerful flywheel: more usage -> more fees -> more operators -> more security.
$15B+ TVL
Security Backstop
AVS Model
Go-to-Market
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Protocols Shipped
$20M+
TVL Overall
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On-Chain Attribution is Broken. Here's How to Fix It. | ChainScore Blog