How to use Block Explorers?

Block explorers are websites where every person can find all mined blocks, validated transactions, wallet addresses, and smart contracts in the blockchain. For example, for Bitcoin it is blockchain.com* for Ethereum it is etherscan.io** and for Binance Smart Chain it is bscscan.com***. 

Learning how block explorers work might be very useful if you send transactions frequently. You do not need to connect the wallet or open the account to use the platform, the only things you need are transactions, wallet, or block details.

Why use block explorers?

They are a great source of information of both blockchains, not only about transaction and block details but also about tokens based on the particular blockchain. If you know how to move on the block explorer, you can see what the founders of the token do with it, this might be helpful to recognize a scam project. Moreover, you can see validated blocks and transactions in real-time, who mines the blocks, and reads smart contracts - it is very useful if you use dApps. 

Searching information on the block explorer

Etherscan and BSCScan are created by the same development team, so the interface looks actually the same.

Transactions and wallets

Let’s look at the etherscan.io** interface. 

In this text area, you can look for transactions, blocks etc. For example, let’s find a transaction with hash 0x8f6540e240e7a2a2e57e8c034b3f51c97cfb457b10d8b2f17e36fe462ada03d8.

Transaction hash - an encrypted ID of the transaction (TXID)

Status - an information whether the transaction is successful, pending or failed 

Timestamp - the timestamp of the block the transaction was added to

From - an address of sending wallet 

To - an address of receiving wallet

Value - an amount sent in the transaction

Transaction fee - a fee paid for the transaction

Gas price - a cost per unit of gas in the transaction

You can also check the transaction looking for the wallet. Let’s check the sender’s wallet: 0x9586f60e3d8e6c3d32403da296c78b949c86c73b. 

You can see the balance, Ether and other tokens value and transactions that this wallet was involved in.

Smart contracts

Now let’s look at bscscan.com.

Tokens on Ethereum and BSC chain have their ID called a contract, now we are looking for the contract page of Ethereum based on the Binance Smart Chain, its contract address is 0x2170ed0880ac9a755fd29b2688956bd959f933f8. 

The page for both contracts and wallets looks similar. However, you can write and read the contract of each token. It means that you can check the owner of the contract, name, symbol etc. and also make transactions using it.

Where to find gas price?

You can find the average price of transaction fees on the main page of Etherscan and BSCScan. After clicking that, you can check more information about gas fees at the moment.