How to read a cryptocurrency transaction on a blockchain explorer ？

Let’s analyze a transaction on a block explorer. For those unfamiliar with cryptocurrency transactions, this might seem quite confusing. A mishmash of numbers and letters. Let’s break this down into smaller sections, and go over each separately. Here’s a screenshot from the blockchain.com block explorer for a Bitcoin transaction:

1. THE TRANSACTION HASH ID

The transaction hash, also known as the Transaction ID, is the identifier of this specific transaction. In simpler words: it’s the code associated with this transaction. If you ever want to look up the details of a certain transaction, you’ll need to enter this string of code into a block explorer.

2. THE SENDING ADDRESS(ES)

This section shows which address is sending cryptocurrencies associated to it, as well as how much it is sending. You can also click on the address to see its incoming and outgoing transaction history.

When you make a Bitcoin transaction, you will automatically send the full amount from your address with the rest sent to your change address. Let’s take a closer look at that:

In this example, your address has a balance of 1 BTC. You want to send 0.1 BTC to a friend of yours. When you create a transaction, you will send the entire balance of your address. Of course, this doesn’t all go to your friend. They receive the 0.1 BTC as intended. The remaining 0.9 BTC is sent to your change address. This address is fully in your control. This is unique to Bitcoin and its derivatives – Ethereum and XRP wouldn’t send out the entire balance of an address, for example.

3. THE FEES

Most cryptocurrency networks have fees associated with transactions. Bitcoin is no different in this. In this section, you can see how much the transaction has cost in fees. These fees are paid to those validating blocks for the network, which are filled with transactions.

4. THE RECEIVING ADDRESS(ES)

In this section, we can see which addresses are the intended destination of a transaction. For each address, we can see how much they are receiving. Similar to the sending address, you can click on the receiving ones to see their transaction history. Usually, the bottom of these addresses is the previously explained change address.

5. THE TRANSACTION’S STATUS

An often overlooked, yet very important part of a transaction: it's status. For a transaction to be completed and considered valid, it first needs to be confirmed by those validating them. An unconfirmed transaction like the one shown above can still be ruled invalid or canceled. It’s best to consider unconfirmed transactions as “not received yet” and wait till it’s actually confirmed.

It is possible to see more than one sending or receiving address as well. That'd be through a more advanced feature known as “Transaction batching”. This is a commonly used feature by cryptocurrency exchanges, where they’d send cryptocurrencies to multiple people through a single transaction to reduce fee costs.