Staying safe while you browse

The explorer itself is one of the safest places in crypto, because it only reads. What it shows you, however, is a public space that has scammers in it. This page is the short list of things worth knowing, and it is the most useful page in this section.

The explorer will never ask you for anything

No password. No seed phrase. No private key. No twelve or twenty-four words, written down or typed in.

Nothing on this site needs them, and neither does any legitimate site, wallet, exchange or support person, ever, for any reason. There is no exception to this. Anyone asking, however plausible their story, is trying to rob you, and handing those words over loses everything in the wallet immediately and permanently.

Looking is safe

Opening an address page, including someone else's, does nothing to that address. Copying an address does nothing. Sharing a link to a transaction does nothing beyond pointing at something that was already public.

You cannot break anything by browsing here.

Check the whole address, every time

Addresses are long, and people compare them by the first few and last few characters. Scammers know this. They generate an address that starts and ends the same as one you have used, then arrange for it to appear in your transaction history so that you copy it out of there by mistake.

Two habits defeat this completely.

Copy from the source, not from your history. Take the address from the person or the site you are paying, in the message where they gave it to you.

Compare the middle. If you check anything, check the characters in the middle, not the ends.

Sending to the wrong address cannot be undone. Not by you, not by the explorer, not by anyone.

The red scam warning

Some addresses carry a red warning at the top of their page saying they have been reported. If you were about to send something there, do not. If you have already dealt with that address, stop dealing with it.

The absence of a warning means nothing at all. Most bad addresses have never been reported.

Tokens that arrive by themselves

Anyone can send anything to any address, so a token you never asked for can appear in your wallet. Usually it is bait, designed to make you visit a site to claim or sell it, and that site is where the theft happens.

Ignore it. Do not visit its website, do not connect your wallet anywhere to deal with it, do not try to sell it. Reading about it here is harmless.

Nobody can reverse a transaction

Not the explorer, not L2 Protocol, not a validator, not anyone. A confirmed transaction is final by design, which is the same property that stops anyone from taking your coins back off you.

This has a practical consequence: there is no support desk that can recover a mistaken payment, and anyone who claims to be able to do so, for a fee, is running a second scam on the victims of the first.

Your activity is public and permanent

Every transaction you make is visible to anyone, forever. The chain does not know your name, but an address is a thread: anyone who learns that one address is yours can see everything it has ever done, including where your coins came from and where they went.

If that matters to you, keep separate addresses for separate purposes, and think before publishing an address next to your name.

A short checklist before you send anything

• The address came from the person you are paying, in this conversation, and you copied it whole.
• You checked the middle of the address, not only the ends.
• You are on the right chain.
• The amount is right, and you are not sending your whole balance, because the fee has to come out of it too.
• Nobody is rushing you. Being hurried is the single most reliable sign of a scam.

Where to ask

Ask before you act, not after. That single habit prevents most of what goes wrong in crypto.

For anything that involves your own coins, open a ticket at support.l2protocol.com. It goes to someone whose job it is to answer, and a transaction hash or an address is enough for them to see what happened. The community channels in the footer are fine for a quick second opinion.

Neither of them, and nobody claiming to be either of them, will ever need your seed phrase. See Getting help.