What is a Blockchain Explorer & how to read one?
On any cryptocurrency blockchain, many transactions are batched in a single block. The blocks when ‘chained’ together on a decentralized ledger give meaning to what we generally refer to as ‘blockchain’.
The transactions in the blocks are ‘confirmed’ by a lot of anonymous computers through ‘Proof of Work’. However, in ‘Proof of Stake’, the people who have ‘staked’ their tokens get to process transactions – the higher the stake, the larger the reward.
Blockchain Explorers in essence provide information about all the transactions that are processed on the respective Blockchain.
http://blockchain.com/explorer is for Bitcoin
http://etherscan.io is for Ethereum
And so on…
How to read a transaction?
In a ‘normal’ transaction, you can see who sent what & how much to someone else and which type of token was sent. Every user on a network is identified by their wallet address. All Ethereum addresses start with 0x.
In the image below, an inward transaction of 0.037 ETH is made from ‘Coinbase 4’. The other transaction is a swap to another token.
Source : Google
Further analyzing through the dropdown of ‘Token’, we get to see what tokens does the wallet hold. This particular wallet holds 4 billion Saitama Inu tokens, worth $49.55.
Source : Google
Furthermore, we also see that there were 355 other transactions along with 102 interactions with internal smart contracts.
Also, the miner earned 2.18 ETH for validating the block of transactions in 4 seconds.
Source : Google
Next time you have a transaction which occurs on a blockchain, make sure you explore all the details!
The above blog is for informational purposes only and is not to be construed as any sort of investment advice.
Info source: Decrypt
