Why I Still Check Ethereum Transactions Manually (and How to Do It Right)

01 Sep, 2025

Whoa! I swear, sometimes the mempool feels like Times Square at midnight. My instinct said this would be straightforward. Really? Not even close. Tracking ETH flows is part detective work, part ritual. At first you think you’re just watching numbers. Then you notice patterns that don’t make sense, and you start to dig—way deeper than you planned.

Okay, so check this out—transaction explorers are the backbone of on-chain transparency. They’re the place you go when a contract acts shady or when a transfer looks weird. For me, the etherscan block explorer has been that go-to tool. It surfaces raw data, token movements, and contract calls that most wallets hide. And yes, there are dashboards and paid APIs that summarize stuff, but nothing beats inspecting the actual calldata and logs when you need the unvarnished truth.

Here’s the thing. On-chain analytics feels scientific until human behavior creeps in. People herd. Bots snipe. Miners reorder. It’s messy. Hmm… that part bugs me. Sometimes an address will swap tokens right as gas spikes, and my gut says there’s frontrunning. Initially I thought it was coincidence, but then I pulled the trace and saw repeated patterns from the same relayer—ah-ha. Actually, wait—let me rephrase that: the data suggested a pattern, though it could still be noise. So you keep testing, and the more traces you pull, the better your model of “normal” becomes.

Short tip: start with the block, not the wallet. Block context shows you who paid what gas and which transactions were bundled. Medium tip: read the logs; many people ignore logs and then wonder why they can’t reconcile a balance. Longer thought: if you’re serious about attribution, combine transfer events with input decoding across multiple blocks, and track approvals too, because approvals often reveal intent before the money moves.

How I Approach a Suspicious Transaction

Step one: breathe. Seriously? Yes. When you see a three-figure transfer vanish in minutes, panicking leads to mistakes. Step two: copy the tx hash. Paste it into the explorer and scan the method signature. Step three: decode input if needed. If the UI doesn’t show it, decode it yourself. This is where the etherscan block explorer shines—I’ve used it to unravel rug pulls and to confirm multisig executions many times. You’ll see the contract call, then the event logs, and suddenly the story becomes clear.

On one hand, viewers show you balances. On the other hand, they rarely show motive. Though actually, motive leaks through repeated approvals and interacting addresses. My experience tells me to watch the approvals tab first. If a contract has a wide allowance to a swap router, that could be benign or it could be the beginning of a cleanup. You won’t know until you look at the sequence of calls and the timestamp drift across blocks.

Small practical thing: keep a private notes doc. Jot addresses, tags, and theories. I do this and it saves time later. I’m biased, but notes feel like a map of your investigative memory. Somethin’ about it makes the whole process less chaotic.

Gas tells stories too. When gas jumps, someone paid to push a transaction up the queue. That could be a strategic arbitrage or a desperate shove to exit a position. Sometimes you can infer whether an actor is a bot by the exact gas pattern across sequential blocks. Longer analysis requires fetching multiple traces and comparing them across time windows, which—yes—takes patience and sometimes a script.

Tools and Techniques I Use Every Day

Start simple. Use the explorer to get the tx hash, block number, and call details. Then:

• Decode input data. If the UI doesn’t do it, paste the hex into a decoder.
• Follow token transfer logs to map in/out flows.
• Check internal transactions for hidden movement.
• Compare timestamped actions across related addresses.
• Tag addresses when patterns repeat—this builds your mental blacklist.

Hmm… I once found a clever scam that used nested contract calls to obfuscate a drain. My first impression was “just another swap”—but the trace told a different tale. Initially I thought the attacker used a honeypot. Then I realized they were using a proxy bundle, so balances moved through several contracts before hitting an exchange. That detour matters, because the intermediary contracts were previously benign-looking. So: always follow the money, not the label.

Pro tip: combine on-chain snapshots with off-chain context. A tweet or a Discord announcement often precedes a surge in approvals and swaps. On one occasion a subtle GitHub update coincided with approvals that matched a DAO treasury move, and without the repo note I would’ve misattributed the transfer. So cross-referencing sources reduces false positives.

Also, don’t ignore small addresses. Tiny wallets sometimes act as relays or testing grounds. If you cluster them, patterns emerge. It feels tedious at first, but clustering is the difference between seeing a lone bad apple and discovering an organized campaign.

One last thing—expect surprises. Sometimes what looks like a simple swap is a coordinated liquidity extraction. Other times, it’s an honest developer migrating contracts. On one hand you must be skeptical. On the other hand you must accept uncertainty until you have trace evidence. I’m not 100% sure about everything I say here, but these practices consistently reduce my error rate.

So yeah, keep your toolbelt flexible. Use explorers to get facts, scripts to scale, and your intuition to prioritize investigations. And if you’re wondering where to begin—start with the block, read the logs, and use the explorer that’s reliable. The etherscan block explorer is a sturdy first stop. It’ll save you time when things go sideways, and teach you a lot when you’re quiet and patient.