Solscan Beginner's Guide: How to Track Solana Transactions

Solscan is a free website that shows everything that has ever happened on the Solana blockchain, and tracking a transaction on it takes about ten seconds. Copy the transaction signature from your wallet - the long string of letters and numbers next to the payment - paste it into the search box at the top of solscan.io and press Enter. The page that opens is the receipt: who sent what, to whom, at what time, and whether it worked. Think of the signature as a parcel tracking number. The parcel is already gone; the number is how you look it up.

What do you paste into the search box?

Four different things, and Solscan works out which one you gave it. A transaction signature opens that one transaction. A wallet address opens an account page listing everything that address has ever done. A token address opens the token, with its supply and its biggest holders. A slot number opens the block. You rarely have to copy anything by hand, because Phantom and Solflare both put a "view on explorer" link beside every transaction in your history.

How do you know it actually worked?

Two fields at the top of the page answer that. Result says Success or Fail. Confirmation status says Finalized once the network has settled the transaction for good, which normally takes a few seconds. A Fail is not a lost payment - nothing moved - but it still cost you a fee, because on Solana you pay for the attempt, not the outcome. If your wallet shows nothing at all and Solscan has never heard of the signature, the transaction was never sent.

How do you follow a whole wallet?

Open the account page and use the tabs. Transactions is every signature in order, newest first. Transfers strips that down to tokens and SOL moving in and out, which is usually what you came for. Portfolio totals up what the wallet holds right now. Bookmark your own account page and you have a running statement you never have to log into.

Before a large transfer, send a tiny test amount first and track it through to Finalized - it costs a fraction of a cent and catches a wrong address before it matters. One warning: Solscan only ever needs a public address, so anything claiming to be an explorer and asking for your seed phrase is a scam. Next: what Solscan is and how to read it and how to read a Solana transaction in an explorer.