Reading Transactions

Every on-chain action is a transaction. Learning to read them — not just see green checkmarks — is core analyst skill. Most activity is contract interaction, not simple ETH transfers.

Contract calls can trigger nested ETH transfers not visible in the top-level value field. Explorers show internal txs separately — important for tracing complex DeFi routes and contract-to-contract flows.

Verified contracts decode input into function names and parameters — for example swapExactTokensForTokens on Uniswap. Token transfers appear as Transfer events in logs even when the value field is zero. Read events, not just the main transaction row.