Detecting Bitcoin Wallet Fingerprints to Identify Transaction Origins

A recent study by Ishaana Misra demonstrates how Bitcoin wallet fingerprinting can reveal which wallet software or hardware created a transaction. By defining four fingerprint types—independent, probabilistic, dependent and transient—Misra analyzed eight popular wallets, including Bitcoin Core, Electrum, Trezor and Ledger Live. Using heuristic rules and automated Python scripts, the researcher achieved around 50% accuracy in guessing the originating wallet of recent transactions. Key observations include BIP-69 sorting on Trezor, default single-address reuse in Exodus and no input shuffling in Ledger’s coin selection. The detection tools are available on GitHub and use transaction fields like version, input/output ordering, change output index and fee-rate patterns. Bitcoin wallet fingerprinting poses privacy risks: attackers or counterparties may infer user wealth, software expertise or target vulnerabilities. It can also weaken privacy techniques such as CoinJoin when the same wallet is used on both sides. As fingerprinting becomes automated, traders and developers should assess implementation changes to mitigate metadata leaks.