Understanding The Blockchain Explorer - Etherscan

The world of crypto and blockchain is filled with buzzwords making it extremely difficult for newbies to visualise how a blockchain functions. Understanding the blockchain explorer is one of the most effective ways to speed up your web3 learning journey. So what exactly is a Blockchain Explorer? A Blockchain explorer is a tool to view the information on a blockchain that includes transactions, fees, blocks, smart contracts, token information and much more. This is similar to a product metric dashboard to visualise everything related to the product. A Blockchain explorer is not necessarily built by the creators of the Blockchain. Since, Blockchain is nothing but a public ledger anyone can create a Blockchain Explorer since anyone who runs a node on the blockchain has access to the blockchain ledger data. 

Below are some explorers of popular chains 

• Ethereum - etherscan.io
• Solana - solscan.io, explorer.solana.com
• Polygon - polygonscan.com
• Bitcoin - btcscan.org

Let’s take a look at etherscan the most popular blockchain explorer for Ethereum

Etherscan

Blockchain Explorer - Etherscan - Home Page

On the top you can see information on the price of Ethereum and Gas Fee in Gwei (native units of gas in Ethereum). Gas Fee is the transaction fee on the Ethereum Network that would be distributed to the validators.

The Gas price of Ethereum is dynamic and sometimes spikes above 1000Gwei! depending on supply demand dynamics. A gas fee below 30 Gwei is desirable.

💡Tip: You must always check the transaction fee before making a transaction since sometimes it can be unreasonably high causing you to spend 100s and 1000s of $ simply on transaction fees.

The Search bar allows you to search for any address, transaction hash, block, token or domain name. Too many buzzwords again? Let’s simplify these first before moving ahead. Some of these definitions are also covered in our previous blog on Blockchain Architecture.

Address

An Address is like an account number in a bank. It is the destination to receive and store your funds. When you want to transact on the blockchain you create an account. The account has an address which is called the public key and a private key such that only you can access your account (i.e. create send transactions or deploy contracts)

Search Etherscan (Blockchain Explorer) by Address

Searching by address opens the Page of the Address searched. You will be able to view the ETH balance i.e. the amount of ETH held in the address  and the first and latest transactions in the overview.  Additionally, you will be able to view all the transactions made by the owner of the account address. Remember blockchain is a public ledger? The beauty of the public ledger is that due to all addresses being cryptographic, it perfectly maintains the anonymity of the owner. Hence Blockchain is both transparent and anonymous at the same time.

Transaction Hash

A transaction hash is similar to a transaction id for a transaction you make in a bank. It is a unique identifier in the form of a cryptographic string used to uniquely identify any transaction. 

💭Did you know a transaction receives a transaction hash as soon as it is made. However, sometimes the transaction may not get confirmed for a reason such as selecting too low a gas fee setting, leading to the transaction being cancelled. 

Search Etherscan (Blockchain Explorer) by Transaction Hash

When you search for a transaction with a transaction hash, the transaction details page is opened. 

It shows whether the transaction has been successful (Status), the block number it was included in (keep reading for more info on blocks),  the time the transaction was made (Timestamp), the sender’s address (From) , the receiver’s address (To), the transaction amount (Value in both ETH and USD) , Transaction Fee and the Transaction Fee Rate (Gas Price) at the time of the transactions. 

Token

A Token is a digital representation of an asset on a blockchain such as Ethereum, Polygon, Polkadot. In the case of Etherscan, Tokens refer to EVM tokens i.e. coins that use the Ethereum Virtual Machine runtime environment for smart contracts. Examples of such tokens are Fantom(FTM), Circle USD (USDC), Tether (USDT). These are ERC-20 tokens i.e. they follow the ERC-20 token standard. To know more about Tokens check out the blog on Understanding Tokens.

Search Etherscan (Blockchain Explorer) by Token

The overview shows the total supply of tokens , number of holders and total number of transfers for a specific token. It also contains a list of all the transactions of the token that has taken place, holders information, DEX trades and Token Analytics. 

Remember smart contracts? For a token to be created and it to follow certain rules such as which address owner has the rights to add tokens to supply or what would be the transaction fee or whether a %commission is transferred to a specific address on each transaction a smart contract has to be deployed that will be linked to the token.

For every token, Etherscan shows the Contract Address, that can be clicked on for more info, Below is the Contract Information of USDT.

Smart Contract Details on Etherscan (Blockchain Explorer)

You can check out the Contract Creator and also click on the Contract tab to see the code of the compiled contract that has been deployed. This is how blockchains ensure 100% transparency. Before investing in any token, we must ensure that the contract does not contain rules that give the owner a lot of centralised authority to create fishy business.

Block

In Ethereum, a block is a collection of transactions and other data that are added to the Ethereum blockchain. Each block contains a unique code called a “hash” that allows it to be distinguished from every other block, as well as a “hash” of the previous block in the chain, linking the two. 

Search Etherscan (Blockchain Explorer) by Block

Block height, also known as block number is the size of the ethereum blockchain after addition of this current block. Finalised indicates that validators have confirmed all the transactions in the block and the block has been successfully added to the ethereum network after consensus.

Block reward indicates the reward the validator received for adding this block to the Ethereum blockchain. There are many more terms to explore such as epoch (specific period of time on the blockchain) that we will leave to you. This will help you understand the process of addition of blocks in the blockchain and the role of validators. Since Ethereum is a PoS blockchain, there are no miners involved.

Domains

Ethereum allows a name service feature allowing an Ethereum address to act as a domain name. This can be achieved by Ethereum Name Service. Ethereum Name Service allows the randomly generated letters and numbers of a standard Ethereum address to be converted into more easily recognizable words, like the name of a person or brand. For example, say create an Ethereum address - 0x7B2d0D3DE9e060D3Cf557f97b9a8c143C9789CE8. You can buy a domain name from Ethereum Name Service that ends with ‘.eth’. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum has named one of his addresses - vitalik.eth. 

Search Etherscan (Blockchain Explorer) by Domain

A simple search of vitalik.eth on etherscan will first show the resolved address and information such as resolved address, expiration date and the registrant.

Search Etherscan (Blockchain Explorer) by Domain

Since vitalik.eth is the domain name linked to the Ethereum Address - 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045, you can view all the transactions and address information in a similar manner as searching by a regular address. Just that now you do not have to deal with an ugly string of characters. Interested in getting an address with a cool domain name? There are a lot of name services available.

Summary

We hope we could simplify a lot of terms that form the building blocks of the blockchain. There are a lot more items in etherscan that we will leave it to you to explore further! You can see what is the address balance of the top 10 Ethereum Holders, track all the ERC-20 tokens ever created from the Token Tracker, check out the latest NFT transfers, analyse charts and graphs of the ethereum network showing interesting metrics such as transactions per second, transaction fees and daily active addresses. Etherscan also provides Ethereum Network data through an API service that you can utilise to build products and DApps (Decentralised Applications).