The Ultimate Etherscan Guide
You can find real-time alpha and 100x gems with Etherscan. Etherscan is really useful but most people don’t know how to use it correctly.
Here’s your guide to alpha hunting with Etherscan.
In this Guide:
Gas Tracker
ERC-20 tokens
Wallet Tracking
NFT analysis
Making Transactions
Smart Contract Search
Reading Contracts
Gas tracker
Etherscan’s gas tracker is really useful. Gas on Ethereum can get really expensive. The cost adds up. You can view current gas prices on Etherscan, and choose one that fits your needs best. You can try to estimate the lowest price for a transaction to go through with this info.
Etherscan also displays gas price history. Based on the 7 day gas price graph, we can see that the lowest gas prices for the week are around 12 gwei.
This is really useful when your transaction isn’t time sensitive. I would set my gas price to around 15–20 in this case. Most wallets let you set your gas prices when you make transactions
You can find the Etherscan gas tracker here: https://etherscan.io/gastracker
ERC-20 Tokens
You can use Etherscan to research any ERC-20 altcoin. You can easily access key data like market cap, volume, and number of holders.
You can easily view how much money is going in and out, as well as the change in holdings. Here you can see the holder breakdown for Uniswap.
Wallet Tracking
Wallet tracking is one of Etherscan’s best use cases. You can follow whales and smart money. You can see which transactions occurred as well as when.
Etherscan lets you filter tx history by address for any ERC-20 or NFT you wish. This can even get broken down to transactions including only specific to/from addresses.
A great strategy to find good wallets to track is to look at wallets that got in big positions early. They might be good at identifying tokens early.
To do this look through the transfer history and sort by last.
Look for wallets that bough a lot early. This only works for relatively new coins though as Etherscan only keeps track of the last 100k transactions.
Let’s do this for AXL. This sale looks interesting. This account bought 166k AXL tokens just a few weeks after the initial sale.
View the address in the block explorer. The main page for an address has several useful sections:
Txs — historical transaction row + method called on each
Internal txs — contract interactions
ERC-20 txs — latest token transactions
ERC-721 txs — latest NFT transactions
Analytics — wallet stats
It’s a good idea to see if this person has a history of making winning plays. Look through their ERC-20 transaction history and see if they’ve had success in the past. If so, they’re likely worth following.
For a more in depth guide to wallet tracking check out my Whale Watching Guide:
NFT Transactions
You can track NFT transactions including mints on Etherscan.
You can click on the token address of a project to view more information about it. Similar to the ERC-20 token breakdown, you can view useful information about an NFt project. You can look at holders, transfers and more. These can tell you how well an NFT is doing or will do.
You can find the NFT tracker here: https://etherscan.io/nfttracker
Making Transactions
Crypto and more specifically DeFi Dapps are often buggy. The UI normally takes time to update, and these apps often don’t work for hours on end.
You don’t have to wait. Etherscan provides a simple interface for making transactions on different smart contracts, for any connected wallet.
Just go to the contract page and you can select write contract.
Smart Contract search
Etherscan’s smart contract search feature is really handy. You can use it to find information about specific tokens before anyone else does. It’s possible to find answers to questions like: what contracts use this token?
You can find the Etherscan smart contract search here: https://etherscan.io/searchcontract
Reading Contracts
You can read the source code of any smart contract. This is under the contract section of the smart contract. This can be useful if you have experience reading code and want to take a closer look at a project. Here I’m looking at the Moonbirds contract.
When you’re looking at smart contract code, you can change the url from “.io” to “.deth,net”
This opens a deployment ready directory window in visual studio. You can view and edit the contract you were looking at here.