How to read a Cardano transaction on Cardanoscan

Finding it

How do I find my transaction?

Open your wallet's activity list and tap the entry you care about. Every wallet shows a transaction hash, a 64-character hexadecimal string, sometimes labelled transaction ID. Copy it. Most wallets also offer a "view on explorer" link that does the paste for you.

Type cardanoscan.io yourself or use a bookmark, then paste the hash into the search box. The same search box accepts an address, a stake address, a block number, a pool ticker or a token name, and works out which you pasted. Cexplorer and AdaStat do the same job; all three read the public ledger, so they agree on the facts and differ only in presentation.

A hash that returns nothing on any explorer is not on chain. Your wallet either never submitted it or it was rejected, in which case no fee was charged and nothing moved.

The model

What do inputs and outputs actually mean?

Cardano does not keep account balances. It keeps a list of unspent transaction outputs, and your wallet balance is the sum of the ones your keys can unlock. An output is an address plus a value, described in the official explainer as a lock plus what is behind it. An input is a pointer to somebody's earlier output together with the witness that unlocks it (docs.cardano.org, checked September 11, 2026).

The rule that surprises people is that an output is consumed once and as a whole. You cannot spend part of one. So if your wallet holds a single output of 100 ADA and you send 10, the transaction takes all 100 in, pays 10 to the recipient and the fee, and sends the remainder back to an address of yours as change. On the explorer that reads as a large amount leaving and most of it returning. Nothing went missing. What moved is the output line addressed to somebody else, not the total at the top.

A useful side effect: the fee for a valid transaction can be worked out exactly before it is posted, which is why your wallet quotes a fee and then charges that exact amount.

Field by field

What does each field on the page mean?

Explorers word their labels differently, but all show the same record. Here is each part and what is worth checking.

Three patterns

What do the common transactions look like?

A plain ADA transfer. One or more inputs from your addresses, two outputs: the amount to the recipient and the change back to you. A fee, no metadata, no minting section, no certificates. To check that somebody paid you, read the value of the output addressed to you and ignore the total, which includes their change.

A native token transfer. Same shape, with tokens listed inside the output rather than as a separate transfer. The token line shows the policy ID, the asset name and the quantity. You will also see a small amount of ADA in the same output, because an output cannot hold tokens alone: every output must carry some ADA, and the required amount rises with the number of distinct token types in it, not with how many of each (docs.cardano.org, checked September 11, 2026). That ADA is not a fee. It belongs to whoever controls the output afterwards, which is why a wallet emptied of ADA cannot move its tokens.

A DEX swap. This is two transactions, not one, and only the first carries your signature. The transaction you sign sends ADA to a contract address as an order. A separate off chain service called a batcher then collects orders and settles them against the pool in a transaction of its own, which is the one where your tokens appear (docs.minswap.org, checked September 11, 2026). In our experience the order sits pending between the two for a short while. If you search only the hash your wallet gave you, you will see the ADA leave and nothing come back; open the address it went to, or the exchange's own order screen, to find the settlement. The Minswap guide walks through the whole flow. Minswap removed batcher fees for users in May 2025, so the visible costs are the pool's trading fee and the network fees.

Tokens and addresses

How do I read a token page and an address page?

A token page is reached by searching the policy ID or the token name. The policy ID is the 56-character identifier of the minting policy and the only part of a token's identity that cannot be copied. Names can. Check it against the project's own site first. For $CATSKY it is 9b426921a21f54600711da0be1a12b026703a9bd8eb9848d08c9d921copy. The page also lists the mint transactions, so you can see when the supply was created and whether more has been minted since, plus a holder count and holder list. The display name and logo come from metadata attached to the mint transaction under label 721 (CIP-25, checked September 11, 2026). The policy ID guide covers the checking in detail.

An address page shows the ADA balance, every token the address holds, and the transactions that touched it. A mainnet payment address starts with addr1. Most are base addresses, which contain two parts: a payment part that controls the funds and a delegation part that controls the staking rights (CIP-19, checked September 11, 2026). That second part is why the page can also show a stake address, starting stake1, and the pool it is delegated to. Opening the stake address gives the combined view of every payment address in that wallet, which is usually the figure your wallet displays. Addresses with no delegation part, used by some custodians, show no staking section.

Finality

When is a transaction actually final?

A slot is one second long, but only about one slot in twenty produces a block, which works out at roughly twenty seconds between blocks (docs.cardano.org, checked September 11, 2026). A submitted transaction normally lands in a block quickly, and the confirmations counter climbs from there.

Confirmations are simply depth: how many blocks sit on top of yours. Cardano's documentation frames finality as a probability that rises with depth, and gives one hard guarantee. A transaction becomes immutable once its depth is greater than 3k/f slots, which is 129,600 slots, or 36 hours, on the current mainnet. The same page notes that this threshold "normally exceed[s] the requirements in most situations", so the practical approach is to accept a transaction once the probability is high enough (docs.cardano.org, checked September 11, 2026).

The gap between a transaction being confirmed and its assets being usable elsewhere is what the documentation calls the settlement window, and it is why an exchange may show a deposit as received but not yet credited. Each exchange sets and publishes its own threshold; the protocol does not set one.

Related: all guides · Cardano transaction fees explained · verify a token policy ID · Cardano tools directory