Exchange flows answer a simple question: are coins moving onto exchanges, where they can be sold, or off them? The exchange flows page shows it for QRL. Getting that number right is harder than it looks, and this page explains how it is measured.
Deposits don't go where you'd expect
An exchange gives every customer a personal deposit address. Customers send their coins there, and some time later the exchange moves ("sweeps") the balance into its own hot or cold wallet:
holder ── deposit ──> personal deposit address ── sweep (later) ──> exchange wallet
The exchange's own wallet is public and labelled. The personal deposit addresses are not: there is one per customer, and nothing on the chain says who they belong to.
A query that only counts transfers into the labelled exchange wallet therefore measures the sweeps. It misses the moment a holder actually handed over their coins, attributes the deposit to the deposit address instead of the holder, and puts it on the day of the sweep. When we measured on QRL mainnet in August 2026, 97.7% of exchange inflow arrived through such a deposit address rather than directly.
Finding deposit addresses from their behaviour
Quantascan finds deposit addresses from what they do, with three signals:
- One destination. At least 95% of everything the address ever sent went to a single labelled exchange.
- Nothing kept. What it sent is 90–101% of what it received: it passes coins through and holds nothing.
- Few funders. Only a handful of addresses ever sent to it. A personal deposit address is funded by its owner; an exchange wallet by thousands.
One more rule prevents false positives: a pattern only counts once at least five addresses behave this way towards the same exchange. A single holder who cashed out their whole balance in one transfer looks exactly like a deposit address on its own. It never becomes five.
Detection reruns every day over the full history, so an address can also stop being classified if its behaviour changes. Deposit addresses carry an exchange relay badge on their address page.
Withdrawals stay simple
Withdrawals don't need the same treatment. An exchange can pay out straight to any address, and when we checked the chain for a hidden payout layer (many near-identical addresses all forwarding to one unlabelled wallet), there wasn't one. Withdrawals are counted as transfers from a labelled exchange wallet to anyone outside it.
Moves within an exchange don't count
An exchange also moves coins between its own wallets and its own deposit addresses: topping one up, sweeping it back. Both legs cross the line between "labelled wallet" and "deposit address", so a naive count books every such round trip as a withdrawal and a deposit. Treating the exchange's wallets and its deposit addresses as one side removes them: only transfers that cross from outside that side to inside it, or back, are counted. In August 2026 this removed about 20 million QRL of internal round trips from each direction.
The aggregate (all exchanges together) uses the boundary of all exchanges combined, so a transfer from one exchange to another is internal. The per-exchange table uses each exchange's own boundary, so the same transfer is an outflow for one venue and an inflow for the other.
How the numbers are checked
For every exchange, one identity must hold:
coins counted in − coins counted out − fees paid = balance the exchange holds on chain
The balance is measured independently of the flows, so this catches a missed or double-counted transfer. When last measured it held exactly for six of ten venues, and to within 0.05% for the worst one.
An exchange that has not used its wallets for over a year is marked inactive, and one known to have shut down is marked closed. Their coins still count as held, but no longer as available to sell. Coins that still reach their old deposit addresses are stranded there, because nothing sweeps them any more, so the table shows no net flow for these exchanges.
Some exchanges use more than one wallet. The table shows one row per exchange and lists each of its wallets by name. A transfer between two wallets of the same exchange is internal and is not counted as flow.
Limits
- Labels decide the scope. Only exchanges with a curated, labelled wallet are measured. An exchange we have not labelled is invisible.
- Behaviour, not identity. A deposit address is inferred from its pattern. The figures are measurements of that pattern, not statements about who owns an address.
- QRL only for now. Exchange flows are measured on QRL. QRL 2.0 is still on testnet and has no exchange listings.
For the figures themselves, see exchange flows and the exchange net flow chart. For large single holders, see the whale tracker.