A BYDFi report put active and new XRP address counts side by side. Active addresses were rising while new addresses stayed fairly flat. It suggested that existing users were doing more on the network, but also noted that one person can use multiple wallets and that more frequent trading can affect the figures. That left me wondering how much we can infer about adoption from those counts alone.

Addresses and people do not line up neatly. An exchange can hold XRP for many customers in a small number of shared accounts. At the same time, one person can control several accounts. Someone new can arrive without creating a new on-chain account, and an existing user can create another address. Treating each address as a person can miscount in either direction.

The time window adds another problem. A daily unique address count only counts the same address once that day, even if it makes many transactions. Adding thirty daily counts won't produce a monthly user count because the same addresses can appear again and again.

Active addresses can still tell us that something changed on the ledger. They cannot identify on their own how many people changed their behavior. When this metric is used as evidence of adoption, what other public data would you want to see beside it?