Methodology

PSEUDONYM reads three separate chains for both Polkadot and Kusama, because a single account's data now genuinely lives in three places:

• The Relay Chain — the account's history from before a 2025 migration, plus a smaller balance that, in practice, is still separately live and spendable there.
• Asset Hub — the account's current balance, staking and governance activity.
• The People Chain — an on-chain identity, if the account has registered one.

The reason: in November 2025 for Polkadot (earlier for Kusama), balances, staking and governance were moved off each network's Relay Chain onto its Asset Hub, so what used to be one chain's worth of data is now spread across three.

• Balance — total DOT/KSM held: transferable funds plus anything staked or otherwise held, added across the Relay Chain and Asset Hub.
• Staked — DOT/KSM bonded to participate in NPoS staking (nominating or validating), read from Asset Hub.
• Transactions — the total number of extrinsics (on-chain actions) the account itself has signed, combined from before and after the migration. Actions taken through a proxy or multisig are not signed by the account, so they are not counted here.
• Votes — OpenGov referenda voted on directly, plus delegations (handing voting power to another account, which counts as participation), plus any governance activity from before the migration.
• Sent / received — the exact lifetime count of transfers made and received, combined across both chains.
• Identity — an on-chain display name the account has chosen to register. Most accounts have none, and the portrait doesn't need one.

Each visual element in the portrait maps to specific on-chain signals. For each one, the two images show the low and high end of that single parameter with everything else held constant.

An SS58 address is just one network's text encoding of an underlying 32-byte public key — the same account looks like a different string on Polkadot, on Kusama, or on a generic Substrate chain. PSEUDONYM decodes every address back to that public key and uses it — never the address text — to fix the account's color theme, palette and cell layout. That means the same account gets the same visual fingerprint no matter which network format it's entered in.

What does differ per network is the activity-driven detail — richness, viscosity, vortex count, turbulence, light direction — because that reflects what the account has actually done on that particular chain, which is genuinely different data.

The same input always produces the same image. There is no randomness and no animation: the account's data is hashed once into a fixed value that stands in for time inside the underlying fluid simulation, so rendering is a single fixed frame, not a loop. Anyone can verify this — generate the same address twice and compare, or compare the generic "5…" format of an address with its native format on the same network.

The figures described above — balance, staking, transaction and vote counts — were checked field by field against Subscan's own data for a set of real Polkadot and Kusama accounts in September 2026, to confirm each one means what this page says it means. The internal checks themselves aren't published here; this page states the conclusion.

If you generate a portrait and submit a reflection, this is exactly what's kept:

• The portrait — the address, the color theme, the composition, a snapshot of the stats used to render it, and when it was created. No image file is stored; the portrait is regenerated from the address and that snapshot every time it's shown.
• The reflection (only if you answer the four questions) — a link to the portrait, the address in shortened form, your four answers, whether the portrait was shown in its public or hidden mode, a moderation status, and when it was submitted.

No IP address, device information or other tracking data is stored by this application. A reflection becomes publicly visible only after manual review, not the moment it's submitted, and is never verified as having actually been written by the address's owner. To request a reflection's removal, email pseudonym.arkain@gmail.com.

• Live data is cached for up to 10 minutes, so a very recent on-chain change may not show immediately.
• This is an independent project running on free-tier services. When many people look up portraits at once, a lookup may ask you to try again in a moment, and the archive can be briefly unavailable after a long idle period — in both cases the site shows a clear message rather than made-up or empty data.
• Everything here depends on Subscan's own indexing. If a source can't be reached, you see an error, not made-up numbers; a metric shown as zero means the data was read and none was found.
• "Identity" only ever means an on-chain name someone has chosen to register. The portrait doesn't know, and doesn't claim to know, anything else about who holds an address.

Related work that informed how this project thinks about data, portraiture and identity:

• Ian Cheng, 3FACE (2022) — a generative portrait that reads a wallet's public transaction history.
• Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stranger Visions (2012–13) — speculative portraits algorithmically inferred from public genetic traces.
• Laurie Frick, data portraits — handmade works built from the patterns of personal daily-life data.
• Meiklejohn et al., "A Fistful of Bitcoins" (2013) — the foundational study of how much a public ledger reveals about its users.
• The Polkadot identicon — the existing, much simpler precedent for a visual fingerprint derived from an account's public key.