In my alpha hunting guide, I mentioned that Etherscan is a good way to find alpha. Check it out here:
Etherscan is a block explorer that is super handy. Understanding block explorers and using them properly can give you a huge edge. Etherscan has a bunch of useful info & stats about the Ethereum Blockchain.
Here’s a tweet that goes over the basics of Etherscan:
Here’s an explanations of key terms: https://docs.ethhub.io/guides/deciphering-a-transaction-on-etherscan/
Gas tracking
One of the most popular features is the gas tracker. ETH gas is very expensive. Etherscan can help you choose the lowest/best gas price.
You can look at the current gas prices and estimate what the lowest would be for the transaction to go through. A useful thing to do, when your transaction isn’t time sensitive, is to look at the gas price history and make estimates off of that.
Look over the 7 day gas history. When you hover over this, you get info on the lowest gas prices over the week. For this week, the lowest gas prices for the last three days were 28, 25 and 22.
If my transactions isn’t time sensitive, I would change the gas price on metamask to around 25. Here’s how to change your gas prices.
Based on the past few days, I can roughly estimate how low gas will go at its lowest. The transaction may take a couple of hours or even a day or two, but when you’ve time, you can save a lot on gas. Tip: Gas is usually cheapest over the weekend and between 1–3am UTC.
Alt coin research
You can use Etherscan to research ERC-20 alt coins Etherscan pulls up key data, including marketcap, volume and number of holders.
This is the breakdown for USDT. You can pull up a bunch of information including the breakdowns & names of holders, analytics and contract information. This is really useful.
Following smart money & identifying who holds what & how much is one of the best ways to gain insight into the project’s merit. If you see a bunch of top dogs holding a particular token, that usually means that this project is worth looking into.
You can also see how much money is going in, how much is going out and change in holdings. This can tell you a lot about growth of the coin, whether top money is dumping it or whether they are buying more. This gives you one of the best overviews of the ETH ecosystem
With Etherscan, you can search up transactions.
Copy a public wallet address and paste it in the search bar. Etherscan will show you all the assets in the wallet, total value, number of transactions and more. It can even put it in a nice chart if you’d like.
In addition to this, you can gain a bunch of insights about each individual transaction. This has multiple uses. You can very easily reflect and go over your own transactions. You can look at other people’s public wallets and gain insights
Remember, it is very important that you do not just copy trade. Use these tools as just one piece of information when you are conducting research.
You can find smart contracts on Ethereum.
https://etherscan.io/searchcontract
There are so many scams in crypto. It is very easy to send money to the wrong address. Using Etherscan, you can find the accurate contract address. Go to the token page (link above) → click on the token you’re looking into → Click on the contract address.
This will take will pull up a bunch of useful info on transactions, ether balance & more. If you connect your wallet, you can even read the contract’s code, allowing you to quickly identify the legitimacy of the address.
NFT mints & transactions
Etherscan allows you to track NFT transactions and mints. Similar to the token breakdown, Etherscan provides you with a bunch of super useful details for NFT analysis. You can pull up info on the holders, the contract & more.
https://etherscan.io/nfttracker#mint
This is the breakdown for an NFT collection that’s just getting minted. This is a powerful tool — You can look at holders, transfers and more. These can tell you how well an NFT is doing or will do. Most don’t look at this data, use it — it can give you a big edge
You can do the same for Dexs and trading pairs. Etherscan is a very powerful tool. Blockchains are transparent & open, there’s a lot of value in looking at the data and analyzing it. There’s a reason why all the top researchers & analysts spend hours and hours on data.
There’s a lot to Etherscan, don’t let that intimidate you. A lot of it is actually pretty simple and it can give you a big edge. Just dive in, play around with it, you’ll learn as you go. Treat Etherscan as one tool in your research arsenal.
I hope this Etherscan guide was helpful. In the coming days, I’ll dive more into the different parts of Etherscan and using them for analysis, follow to keep up.
