According to Cointelegraph, Philip Torres, co-founder and chief data scientist at blockchain analytics provider 0xScope, has argued that active user count can be a misleading metric for measuring the state of a crypto ecosystem. Torres explained that a small group of users can generate a significant portion of activity across multiple wallets, making the ecosystem appear healthy on the outside. He found that the average Ethereum user possesses at least 10 addresses, and noted that there are legitimate reasons for users to have multiple wallet addresses, such as privacy concerns or automated traders deploying multiple strategies on-chain.
However, multiple wallet addresses have also been used for malicious purposes, such as inflating a project's active user numbers to mislead potential investors, creating a Sybil attack, or users trying to game an upcoming token airdrop. Torres pointed out that it is easy for one person to control multiple wallet addresses compared to email addresses, as creating and controlling multiple crypto wallets is not too complicated if you know what you're doing. Some users employ hierarchical deterministic wallets, which generate a new key pair from a master key pair, allowing them to generate multiple public addresses via a master set of mnemonic words.
