Distinct addresses per day — Distinct addresses transacting per bucket
Active addresses tracks address-level activity on Bitcoin: Distinct addresses per day. It provides a practical, though imperfect, proxy for network participation and adoption.
Use sustained growth or contraction as the signal and compare it with transactions and fees. One-day moves are often caused by wallet batching or exchange operations.
An address is not a person or an account. A single user can control many addresses, while a service can aggregate activity for many users.