In recent times, the FTX saga has been dominating headlines. Due to mismanagement of user funds, Sam Bankman-Fried (ex-CEO of FTX) had to file FTX, FTX US, and Alameda for bankruptcy. Hours later, FTX announces that their exchange has been hacked. What a terrible coincidence! Suddenly, over $600 million dollars of assets were lost.
Now, if you’re curious, you may wonder what the “hacker” here is doing with these funds. Today, we’ll provide you a simple guide to Etherscan. With this, you can shed some light on these shady transactions.
Introduction
Now, before we segue into Etherscan, let’s review what its purposes and functions are. Simply put, Etherscan is a block explorer. It is an interface whereby you can view all transactions and interactions on a blockchain.
Moreover, each blockchain usually has its own explorer:
- Etherscan is the explorer for Ethereum.
- Solscan is the explorer for Solana.
- BSCScan is the explorer for Binance Smart Chain.
So, what can we use Etherscan for? Let’s delve deeper with this tweet as a guide.
With the events from the past week, It's become clear that being able to read a block explorer is an important skill to have. Doing so will allow you to understand what's happening on-chain without needing to trust anyone else.
Here's a simple guide on how to read Etherscan 🧵: pic.twitter.com/kWe46hzSCC
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) November 13, 2022
Using Etherscan to View ETH Transfers
Let’s use this transaction from the FTX account drainer as an example. From here, take note of these four fields:
- Transaction Hash. This is a unique identifier for every transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.
- Status. This shows if the transaction is failed, pending, or successful.
- Block. This is the block number of your transaction. Do note there are multiple transactions within the same block.
- Timestamp. This shows when the transaction has been initiated.
Below, you can view the tweet to see this information of the hacker’s transaction.
– Block: the block number of a txn. You can click on the block number to see all txns in a given block.
– Timestamp: when the txn occurred. pic.twitter.com/foKtUQZeaG— cygaar (@0xCygaar) November 13, 2022
In this case, the hacker had moved 9,500 ETH (worth $11.3 million!) to his ETH wallet. Indeed, you can view this info in the transaction details easily.
Using Etherscan to View ERC-20 Transfers
Earlier, we took a look at a transfer of ETH tokens. Now, we look at a sample of an ERC-20 token transaction. Similarly, we use an example from the FTX drainer account.
In essence, they’re pretty much the same. Both ETH and ERC-20 token transfers have the four main fields. To recap, these are the transaction hash, status, block, and timestamp. However, ERC-20 token transfers have an additional field: “ERC-20 Tokens Transferred.” This identifies the type of ERC-20 token transferred.
As an example, the FTX account drainer transferred $26.2 million worth of $USDT tokens to his account. Remember, $USDT is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Hence, it is identified as such above.
There are two other differences which aren’t too significant. But, let’s go through them anyway! Now, you’d notice that the transaction value of the ERC-20 token is 0 Ether. Don’t get confused by assuming no tokens were transferred! It just means that there were 0 ETH transferred. Notably, the ERC-20 token transfer still went through.
The last difference is the least applicable to retail crypto investors like us. Under the “Input Data” field, ERC-20 token transactions contain an extra smart contract function. This instructs the node which function to call to process the subject transaction.
The last main difference is the input info section. Remember in the previous example that the input data was just "0x". In this case, the input data tells the node which smart contract function to call along with the parameters to use. pic.twitter.com/kxME5fn4eC
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) November 13, 2022
Conclusion
So, that concludes our simple guide to Etherscan! With the basic skills above, you’ll be able to read every transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Now, you’d know what these shady hackers are up to!
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