How to use a blockchain explorer

Starting from a transaction hash

This is the most common situation. Someone has sent you something, or you have sent something, and you have a long string of hexadecimal characters that identifies it.

Copy it rather than retyping it. Transaction hashes are sixty-four characters of hex and a single wrong character produces a valid-looking identifier that simply does not exist, which is indistinguishable from a transaction that has not propagated. A great deal of unnecessary alarm comes from exactly this.

Then make sure you are on the right chain. A Bitcoin hash pasted into an Ethereum explorer will not resolve, and the explorer will tell you nothing was found — which reads as bad news when it is actually a routing error. If the sender withdrew from an exchange, the exchange told them which network it used, and that is the field to check first.

Once it resolves, the page in front of you has perhaps forty fields on it. You need three.

The status, and what each state actually means

Unconfirmed, pending, or in the mempool means the transaction has been broadcast to the network and is valid, but has not yet been included in a block. It exists, it is visible to everyone, and it is not final. On Bitcoin this state can last minutes or, if the fee was set too low, effectively forever.

Confirmed means it is in a block. The confirmation count is how many blocks have been produced since, including that one, and each additional confirmation makes reversal more expensive. There is no universal threshold: whatever your exchange or counterparty requires is the number that governs when you are credited, and they publish it.

Failed is a state that exists on some chains and not others. On Ethereum and Solana, a transaction can execute, fail, and still be recorded — consuming a fee and changing nothing else. On Bitcoin there is no equivalent; a transaction is either valid and included, or it is not.

On rollups such as Base there is a fourth thing to read: whether the batch containing your transaction has settled on Ethereum. Confirmed by the sequencer and settled on Ethereum are different events with different guarantees, and the interface uses one word for both.

The fee, and the unit that matters

On Bitcoin, the number that decides when your transaction confirms is the fee rate in satoshis per virtual byte, not the total fee. Miners select by rate because block space is what is scarce.

This means a large transaction paying a high total can be less attractive than a small one paying less. It also means a wallet that shows you only a total in pounds is hiding the figure that determines your position in the queue.

Open the transaction on mempool.space and the page shows your rate alongside the current projected blocks. If your rate falls inside the first projected block, you are minutes away. If you are several blocks down, the estimate is a genuine projection based on what is queued ahead of you.

On Ethereum the equivalent question is different, because since EIP-1559 the base fee adjusts algorithmically and is burned rather than paid to anyone. The part you control is the priority fee, and in ordinary conditions it rarely needs thinking about.

On rollups the fee is dominated by the cost of posting data to Ethereum, which is why a quiet period on the rollup during a busy period on Ethereum produces higher fees. That looks inexplicable until you know where the cost comes from.

The amount, and why it is usually wrong

This is the field that misleads more people than anything else on an explorer, and it does so on Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and every other chain built on the same model.

These chains have no accounts and no balances. They have unspent outputs, and a transaction must spend them whole. If your wallet holds a single output of 2 BTC and you want to send 0.01, the transaction consumes the entire 2 BTC and creates two new outputs: 0.01 to the recipient, and roughly 1.99 back to an address you control.

An explorer reporting "total output" therefore shows about 2 BTC. That figure is correct and it is not what was paid. Screenshots of exactly this are routinely circulated to suggest that enormous sums moved when nothing of the sort happened.

Identifying which output is the payment usually takes a moment's judgement. The one that goes to a freshly generated address belonging to the sender is the change; the one that goes to the address you were expecting is the payment. Some explorers guess and label them, which is helpful and occasionally wrong.

Our guide on reading a Bitcoin transaction works through a real example field by field, and it is worth the ten minutes if you handle Bitcoin regularly.

Starting from an address instead

When you do not have a transaction hash, you look up the address and read its history.

The complication is that "history" means different things on different chains, and on most of them the main list is not the whole picture.

On Ethereum and every EVM chain, value moved by a contract calling another contract appears under internal transactions, on a separate tab. Token transfers appear under token transfers, on another separate tab, because they are log events rather than transaction fields. An address page can look almost empty while a great deal has happened. This single fact explains most "my withdrawal never arrived" reports.

On Tron the same applies to TRC-20 transfers, which is significant because most Tron activity is stablecoin movement.

On Solana your tokens are not at your wallet address at all — they live in separate associated token accounts that your wallet owns.

On Cardano one wallet spreads funds across many payment addresses sharing a stake key, so a single address shows a fraction of your holdings.

The general lesson is that if a balance looks wrong, the most likely explanation is that you are looking at the wrong part of the page rather than that anything has gone missing.

Three habits worth building

Always cross-check anything surprising. Run the same lookup on a second explorer before concluding that funds have vanished or a balance is wrong. Two independently maintained indexes agreeing is strong evidence; one index disagreeing with your expectation is not. This takes ten seconds and has resolved more alarm for us than any other single practice.

Verify tokens by contract address, never by name. Token names and symbols are arbitrary strings chosen by whoever deployed the contract, and they are not unique. A token displaying as USDT with a contract address that is not Tether's is a different asset entirely. This is the most common way people are convinced a payment landed when it did not.

Be deliberate about what you look up. Every hosted explorer learns that someone at your IP address is interested in the addresses you searched. For a public contract that is irrelevant. For your own cold storage it is a meaningful disclosure, and the mitigations — Tor, an onion service, or your own explorer — are covered in our privacy guide.

If you want to try any of this immediately, our multi-chain lookup queries public node APIs directly, stores nothing, and tells you which explorer to open next for the full picture.