The blockchain functions as a triple ledger accounting system for any transactions occurring between any parties. Each party has a ledger balance in their wallet, as well as the public ledger consisting of the blocks which get discovered by miners and published under consensus by other miners to the blockchain. Generally transaction notes, and details including contract interactions and other features related to the currency you are using are all supported by blockchain explorers which allow you to see the details of anyone’s transactions. These are listed publicly, but have long obscure ids known as transaction hashes.

You may need to view your transaction details when you use cryptocurrencies. This is helpful in determining if a particular transaction has been confirmed (often times 3rd parties require 6 or more confirmations before a transaction is considered permanent). You may also enter your wallet’s address and see the entire transaction history.

Some times this requires a public key to identify the entire balance of your wallet on a block explorer. This situation primarily occurs when you use a Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallet. The previous link takes you to an explanation of what an HD wallet is from Ledger Academy. Ledger Nano X and KeepKey are hardware HD wallets.

Two notable blockchain explorer services are:

Coinbase and ShapeShift use similar outbound links to blockchain explorers when providing details about your transactions using their services.

When you look up a transaction hash on one of the above websites, it will list several pieces of information:

  • TX Hash ID
  • Status (Looking for a Success)
  • Block (The id of the block appearing in the blockchain)
  • Timestamp (When the broadcast was acknowledged)
  • From (Sender)
  • To (Receiver)
  • Value
  • Transaction Fee
    • Gas Price/Limit/Used (if Ether)
  • Nonce (The number of the transaction of the address making a payment)
  • Input Data
  • Private Note

The above examples were taken from Etherscan.

There is additional information when an ERC-20 Token is involved with the transaction, or you are interacting with a smart contract. But these resources are generally straightforward and have built in tool-tips to provide clarity on aspects which may be confusing.

Here are some notable transactions you can look at with blockchain explorers:

It’s important to note that under normal circumstances, use of a hardware wallet would allow a user to review such a discrepancy in transaction fees, and the services which integrate the hardware wallets generally automatically select transaction fees which are appropriate for the current network congestion based on selecting (slowest, slow, moderate, fast, fastest) an option on how quickly the transaction will be prioritized.