Everything You Need To Know About Etherscan
The #1 Tool To Protect Yourself From Scams On Ethereum
Hello my friendly frens!
It’s time for another edition of Big Bro Golem teaching you everything you need to know about NFTs.
In today’s article we are talking about Etherscan and Smart Contracts on the Ethereum Blockchain.
You know, those things that make Ethereum so revolutionary and are what web3 is built on top of?
Don’t worry though, I’m not @bowtiedpickle and we’re not going to talk about how to write, build, or even read (the code) of smart contracts.
Today, we’re going to be focusing on…
How To Find & Verify Legit Contracts From NFT Projects So You Don’t Get Scammed During A Mint or Purchase!
Let’s get started.
PART 1) ETHERSCAN IS YOUR BEST FRIEND
You know about Etherscan, don’t you, anon?
If not, here’s a little primer…
Etherscan.io is THE Ethereum blockchain explorer.
It’s homepage looks like this: (in darkmode ofc bc I’m not a psycho)
I highly recommend bookmarking the official website address of Etherscan for security purposes, the official site is: (https://etherscan.io) however, for convenience sake, I personally bookmark (https://etherscan.io/gastracker) so I can look at current gas prices & I know the url is legit.
Etherscan is THE blockchain explorer for Ethereum.
What does that mean?
It means that every single thing (transaction) that has happened or will happen on Ethereum is cataloged, recorded, and can be looked up on Etherscan.
This is a fundamental piece of blockchain technology.
EVERYTHING IS PUBLIC.
That means everything can be looked up on a public database, aka Etherscan.
This is great news for you and I in our fight against scammers.
It means that we are able to VERIFY anything/everything on the blockchain (using Etherscan) BEFORE we interact with anything/everything to check for legitimacy.
As I said above, I recommend that you bookmark the official URL of etherscan so that you don’t accidentally wind up on a fake site.
Etherscan is quite literally your #1 tool for protecting yourself on the blockchain.
Part 2) How To Use Etherscan To Verify A Contract is Legitimate
If there’s one thing that I want you to take away from this article it’s this…
VERIFY EVERYTHING.
In the wild world of Web3 it is safer to lean towards the side of paranoia that everyone is trying to scam you, either on purpose or ignorantly.
In this world you are in control and because of that responsibility YOU must take steps to protect yourself before you act.
That’s why today you are going to learn how use etherscan to verify legitimate contracts.
(Side note: This method also works on all other blockchains, whether you are using Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, etc.)
For an example, let’s look at an already existing, popular collection such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Go to their official Opensea page.
For big & established collections, you can rest assured that if they have the blue check mark on Opensea they are probably legit.
Now if you look at their main collection page on the top right below the Opensea links of “Explore”, “Stats”, etc. you will see 4 icons.
From left to right those links are the official:
Etherscan
Website
Discord
Twitter
If you click on the etherscan logo, you will be taken to their official etherscan contract page.
There’s a few pieces of very important information that you can find on this page:
Official contract address
Contract creator address
Token Tracker
Total transactions
Contract Tab
Let’s go through each one individually.
1. Official contract address
You can see the official contract address on the top left corner of the page.
“Contract: 0xBC4CA0EdA7647A8aB7C2061c2E118A18a936f13D”
Every single wallet and smart contract on Ethereum has their own unique address. This can not be copied or replaced by a scammer.
By knowing this unique address, you drastically reduce the chances of you ever getting scammed because if the address you are interacting with does not match with the official address, you know it is a fake.
2. Contract Creator Address
This is telling you who actually created this contract.
By clicking on that link you can verify that the person who created the contract is actually interacting with it, doing things on it, and is legit.
They will usually be called “(Project Name): Deployer”
3. Token Tracker
As you can see the token tracker says “BoredApeYachtClub (BAYC)” telling you that you are in fact looking at the official contract of the BAYC.
(Note: This is not a fool-proof method as scammers can easily copy the name of a token to represent an official collection when it is not.)
In the case of NFT projects, the NFT is the token, so the token tracker will usually be a representation of what the NFT is called—like coins.
For Ethereum you have $ETH, for Bitcoin you have $BTC, for Bored Ape Yacht Club you have $BAYC
By clicking on the token tracker you will be brought to a page that shows you:
How many tokens there are in the collection
How many unique wallets are holding at least 1 NFT of the collection
How many transactions the collection has done
The official contract address/official site/links
The holders tab
All transaction history
Among other things.
This page quite literally tells you every thing you could ever want to know about an NFT collection.
We’re not going to go too deep into the weeds here—that will be for an *advanced* etherscan article in the future—but for now I want to show you something fun that you can do.
See the tab next to “Transfers” that says “Holders”?
Click on that.
Here you will see the list of the top 1,000 unique wallets that are currently holding the NFTs of that collection and how many they are holding.
I’ve zoomed out so you can see the top-19 holders of BAYC.
The top 10-100 holders of a collection are typically your WHALES of that NFT collection.
Here we can see that the #1 holder of the collection holds a whopping 274(!) BAYC NFTs.
Who is this mystery person?
Well, you can click on their address and see who they are!
(All blockchain information is public, remember?)
Let’s dive in…
After clicking on their address you’ll get brought back to the token tracker page, but this time all of the transactions of that specific wallet you clicked on the holders page are highlighted.
As you can see in the “From” tab, the mysterious person behind this massive holding of 274 APES is not a person at all, but an organization, BendDAO.
Note: BendDAO (among others) is bringing DeFi to NFTs by offering collateralized loans with NFTs. For example, this means you can borrow $50,000 from BendDAO and in exchange you give them your BAYC to use as collateral. After you repay your loan, then you get your BAYC back. If you don’t repay your loan, then BendDAO takes your BAYC and auctions it to the public to get the $$$ back they lent you. Like an NFT Pawn shop!
You can do this for all of your favorite projects and it is a fun way to check out who the whales of the collection are and what they are doing.
By watching these numbers and the top 100-ish wallets, you can see if they are: Buying more, Selling more, or just Hodling. (Very useful to know for NFT traders!)
All of the other stuff is pretty self-explanatory.
4. Total Transactions
This is an important metric because you will be able to see exactly what is happening with this contract.
For established contracts/projects you want to see a big number here.
In BAYC case, there’s over 53,000 transactions!
If you ever go to a contract page of an “established project” and they have less than 100 or even 1k transactions, there’s a very good chance that it’s a scam, copying the contract you were originally trying to access.
5. Contract Tab (IMPORTANT!)
The contract tab is where the Smart Contract lives!
This is a fun & very important section, so pay attention.
Click on it and you’ll see this:
I know what you’re thinking…
“But Golem, I don’t know how to read code, so this contract tab is pointless for me to read, innit?”
WRONG.
When you click on a contract tab you will see 3 different sub-tabs there.
“Code”, “Read Contract”, and “Write Contract”.
Each are VERY IMPORTANT for you to know about.
“Code” is what you think it is, the literal code of the smart contract broken up into different sections.
If you’re not familiar with coding you can skip this for the most part.
“Read Contract” is very important. Click on it.
After you click on it, you’ll see all these different little sections.
This is Etherscan doing you a favor and breaking up the confusing code of the smart contract into little bite-sized pieces, easy for you to understand and digest.
If you click on any of those tabs it will tell you the information for that thing.
MAX APES: Tells you how many NFTs are in the collection “10,000”
REVEAL_TIMESTAMP: Tells you at what ethereum block the BAYC was set to reveal their artwork post-mint “1619820000”
apePrice: Tells you how much it cost to mint 1x BAYC (0.08 $ETH)
Note: I know it says 800000000000000000 with a bazillion 0’s behind it, but that is because $ETH is calculated differently on smart contracts. “Ether or ETH is often used in different denominations of its currency, such as Wei for interacting with smart contracts and Gwei for calculating gas prices.” If you’re interested in learning more/why click here.
And so on and so forth.
Play around with it, clicking on the different sections and figuring out what they pertain to and if that information is useful to you or not.
Finally, we have the “write contract” button.
This is where you are able to directly interact with the contract on ETHERSCAN!
When people say “mint from contract” this is what they are talking about.
It is a very useful skill that I will write a short “how to” article about in the future but for now, just look over this tab.
If you click “Connect to Web3” you will be able to connect your wallet directly with etherscan and onto this contract specifically.
See where it says “4. Mint APE”?
That is where you would go if you wanted to mint a BAYC (or any NFT for that matter) directly from the contract.
Here’s how it would work:
Find official etherscan page for project
Click on Contract Tab
Click on “Write Contract”
Click on “Connect to Web3" & connect your wallet
Click where it says “Mint NFT”
Put in the amount per NFT & how many NFTs you want to mint
Hit “Write”
Submit Transaction
Here’s what it looks like if you do that on the BAYC contract right now:
See how I put (0.08) where it says “mintApe” that’s because I need to put the price in $ETH that we got from the “read contract” tab earlier.
Also, I put (1) in the “numberOfTokens” box, because it costs 0.08 $ETH per NFT.
If I wanted to mint 2 NFT’s I would need to put 0.16 in the box above; 3 NFTs = 0.24; 4 NFTs = 0.32 and so on and so forth.
If you mess up the amount you are supposed to pay via the contract your transaction WILL NOT GO THROUGH which is why it is important to double/triple check these things.
Also… if the project is SOLD OUT and there are no more NFTs to mint, you will get an error message, like the one that popped up for me where it says:
“We were not able to estimate gas…this transaction may fail.” and it will give you an outrageous gas quote, in this case, 1.74 $ETH to attempt the transaction.
If you ignore this warning and attempt to mint anyway, your transaction will fail and you will lose money, so don’t do that.
That’s about everything you need to know for established projects!
Which leads nicely into our final part for the day…
PART 3: How To Make Sure A New Project’s Contract You Want To Mint Is Legit Or Not
This one is going to be a little bit more difficult for me to explain because it is more of an art than a science.
By reading the above section and understanding how Etherscan works and how to look through a smart contract’s key features using the information above you are already 90% above most people in crypto.
So definitely start there and get familiar with that.
When it comes to new mints or new projects, like I’ve said before, you need to be on your guard.
There’s many ways scammers will try to trick and deceive you.
So here’s how you can protect yourself:
Make sure that you are actually minting from a legit smart contract after you click the “mint” button!
Let’s take the Cupcat Catgirls mint that’s going on right now for example…
I have an allowlist spot available, so when I click “mint” this pops up.
Usually it will say 1 of 2 things on MetaMask.
Contract Interaction
Mint
Ideally they will all say mint, but contract interaction works as well.
This is Metamask giving you a preview of what you are about to approve for the transaction.
(NOTE: If you see “Transfer” or “Approve All” that is classic sign that you are about to get DRAINED if you approve this transaction. DO NOT EVER SIGN THAT IF YOU ARE TRYING TO MINT SOMETHING!)
In this case I will be spending 0.04 $ETH + Gas for a “contract interaction”.
But what is the contract I will be interacting with?
See where it says “0x1Aa…” in blue text above?
Click on that and you’ll see this:
Now, click on “view in block explorer” and it will bring you to that contracts official etherscan page.
Now you can look at all of the transactions that have happened/are happening and all of the fun information we talked about above.
Note: It is always important to look at the contract on etherscan you are about to interact with at BEFORE you mint or interact with ANY contract so you can quickly verify its legitimacy.
Here you can see what other people are doing and what happens when they interact with the contract.
In this case you will either “Claim” a free cupcat catgirl or you will “White List mint” or you will “Allow List Mint”; whichever your wallet is allowed to do.
Since I am on the allowlist mint, I can click on the latest allowlist mint transaction someone else did to get a preview of what will happen if I approve the transaction.
As you can see, this person paid 0.04 $ETH + Gas and received the NFT Cupcat Catgirl #6223 for the transaction.
This is what you want to see on the etherscan page to know that you are not going to get scammed and instead will mint an NFT—which is what you wanted to do in the first place.
Wrapping It All Up
That my friends is how you can use Etherscan to find & verify legit contract from NFT projects so you don’t get scammed during a mint or purchase.
In this article you learned:
Why Etherscan is your best friend
How to use etherscan to verify that a contract is legit
How to make sure a new project’s contract is legit
Of course we can’t go over everything you can do or know about this topic in this article, but I am happy that if you read through all of this and familiarize yourself with this information you will be ahead of 90% of other people in the space.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please feel free to drop a comment or DM me on Twitter @BowTiedGolem.
Thank you for taking the time to read through this article, if you found it helpful, please do me a favor and share it with a fren that will benefit from this information.
Also!
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Until next time.
Your fren,
Golem