Etherscan is the most popular blockchain explorer for Ethereum smart contracts. Besides the real-time display of transactions, it also holds features useful to researchers and investors.
In a previous tutorial, I explained Metamask with directions on setting up the wallet on our browser and more importantly discussed how to insert additional networks (sidechains).
“ How to Set Up Metamask and Add Networks (BSC, Matic,OKEx Chain, SmartBCH) — Tutorial”
With this tutorial, I will explain the basics a beginner requires to use Etherscan, the most popular blockchain explorer and analytics tool for Ethereum smart contracts.
This tutorial is not just about Etherscan but the information it contains can also be applied for explorers of different blockchains like BSCscan, Polygonscan.
Tronscan used to have an almost identical structure, but it has lately changed some of its features and polished the website, distinguishing it from the rest.
The address is: https://etherscan.io/
This is the homepage of Etherscan. It is a user-friendly environment, and the website is fast and reliable. It only requires some time for each new user to familiarize themselves with the interface.
We can search using an Address, a Tx Hash, a certain block, etc.
In this example, we perform a search using one of my addresses (public key, starting with 0x...) and we can take a peek inside the wallet balances.
After applying search with our wallet address this screen appears.
Our transactions are at the bottom (I've had them hidden) and we can enter by pressing on the Txn hash to read more information. It is not crucial to do that as a beginner, we can just have this information as a reference if it is required. The Txn Hash is the identity of the transaction that was made in or out of our wallet.
You can also see that one of my transactions failed and has a red exclamation mark. This happened because I used too low gas for fees, so I had to replace this transaction with a similar one with a higher fee.
The first one fails when we perform this action with Ethereum and the second one proceeds. It is similar to replace by fee in the BTC blockchain.
I have hidden the addresses to increase privacy, although there is still leaked information, the age of the transactions, and the block number.
The crucial information on this page is the totals. The bottom of the two circles contains two important details. The ETH balance and the value of our tokens inside the wallet.
Etherscan takes these values from various sources, and sometimes it may valuate certain tokens mistakenly, or using an outdated price of the last trade that happened years ago.
This is one of my old Ethereum wallets that contains nothing of value for the time being despite displaying more than $800 in balances. I hold about 70 tokens in it but I can't sell them from profit, given the Ethereum fees will require more.
Some of these tokens are bad investments I've made in 2017, that I've now written off since they've lost 99% of their value, and others were given to me as airdrops.
It is also important to check the symbol "b" in the top circle.
When there is a number next to the "b" (as with this example), this means that our wallet also has balances in networks besides Ethereum (i.e. BSC).
This is one latest addition in Etherscan, that helps users find out hidden airdrops they'd been given in networks like Polygon (Matic) or Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
This newly integrated service is called "Blockscan", and when pressing it gives us more information:
According to Blockscan I have tokens in all these networks that it tracks. Blockscan however, is not covering all Ethereum sidechains but some of the most important. The testnets are what the name suggests, they are not important and probably contain nothing of value, but you never know, maybe something important is found there too.
Although there is another important reason info Etherscan is providing, the DEX trades.
Etherscan tracks these 37 decentralized exchanges (DEXs): list
It presents information on the latest trades that have performed in the top DEXs like Uniswap, Pancake, and many more.
To see the latest DEX trades, we have to first find the contract address screen on Etherscan.
Each token has a contract address. This is the same with the public address, but also contains the information of the token in question. It has the source code and explains tokenomics.
This list is in the middle of the page when we are examining our (or any) wallet on Etherscan. The first tab, "transactions" is giving information about every transaction made, Ethereum or tokens.
The ERC20 token TXns is giving some more info on the token and the exact amount we send or received. And the ERC721 tokens are about NFTs.
In my example, I had some tokens from a project called Spheroid Universe which I've sold months ago after its price suddenly pumped.
Now, after the price has tanked, I want to check the DEX trades from this token and perhaps buy again if the price is low again.
All I have to do is hover my mouse over the name of the token and the address of the smart contract appears. Clicking on this will open the page containing the information on the smart contract.
From there we have to click on the Tracker icon (in the circle) that tracks the price action and recent trades in DEXs.
This will bring us the page with all the token info:
This contains everything. From social media and website links to all the tokenomics, we want to know. It also contains the smart contract details for developers and auditing.
This page is crucial when researching new projects on the Ethereum network and gives one more hint to the experienced investors when deciding to invest or not.
The part we were looking for, is the DEX trades. This will give us an indication of demand for the token.
So, the last 25 trades appear first and we can view more by pressing the "view all" button (it opens a new tab).
This token seems to have some interest, at least it is not abandoned, it has an active team and an interesting concept. Its price has dropped lately but not as much as I would have wanted to rebuy. It is still about 90% lower since its recent ATH so if I believe in the token, maybe a dollar-cost average investment strategy would help to make a profit if it starts again gaining price.
However, the DEX trades also point to another event. The volumes are low. About $3,000 for each of the last two days. This is thin volume and this investment would be a high risk to buy more than just $100-$200 for the time being.
Etherscan also gives us the name of the DEX the trade happened. These trades were all on Uniswap (V2 and V3).
Sometimes we may press the tracker from another page inside our ERC20tokens.
If we press the tracker of the token from inside the ERC20 page:
...we will find in the tracker page but with our address information only.
This is where many will get confused with Etherscan since it will not show DEX trades on the tabs and will have hidden other information as well.
To bring the page we are looking for we have to press the x button next to our address (bottom red circle, where the arrow is).
By doing so the page of the token tracker will appear without limiting the information by the token holder.
This may puzzle beginners with Etherscan since the amount of information on the page is too much and for many, it will be difficult to locate the important information such as the DEX trades.
Etherscan has incredible valuable information that we can find, and I think that with this tutorial we have covered some the basics. I still remember
It is important part of our research, but also important to follow the project on social media, telegram or discord, where they are more active. If the project is not communicating often with its community, usually this is bad news, but this is also just part of our research.
There is a lot more to examine when investing and first of all we perform due diligence, finding out the names and background of the developers and the team, looking into other projects and previous blockchain experience, etc.
Then of course validating the profiles are real people and not stolen identities. This has happened too often especially during the ICO mania in 2017.
Part of our research is the analytics of a token and etherscan.io is part of our research concerning Ethereum related projects.17.
Feel free to ask any questions when using Etherscan, BSCscan or other explorers of the similar structure.
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