What the block explorer is
The block explorer is at l2pscan.com. Think of it as the public record of everything that has ever happened on the chain, with a search box in front of it.
There is no account, no password and nothing to install. You open it, you look something up, you close it again.
What it is for
Most people come here for one of four reasons.
- To check that a payment arrived. You paste the transaction the sender gave you and the page tells you whether it went through.
- To see what an address holds. Any address, including your own.
- To check a token before trusting it. How many people hold it, how much it moves, and whether its contract has been published.
- Out of curiosity. The chain is running whether or not anyone is watching, and this is the window onto it.
What it cannot do
This matters more than anything else on this page.
The explorer only reads. It cannot move your coins, it cannot undo a transaction, and it cannot change a single thing about what is on the chain. It has no way to help you recover something you sent to the wrong place, and neither does anyone else.
It will never ask you for a password, a seed phrase or a private key. Nothing on the site needs them. Anyone who asks you for those, anywhere, is trying to rob you.
For simply looking things up you do not even need a wallet. A wallet is only involved in one corner of the site, described in Smart contracts on the explorer.
Everything here is public
This surprises people, so it is worth saying plainly: the chain has no private section. Every transaction, every balance and every address is visible to anyone who cares to look, forever, without asking anyone's permission.
What is not visible is who you are. An address is a long string of characters, not a name. The chain does not know your name and the explorer never asks for it. But if anyone learns which address is yours, they can see everything that address has ever done.
What the front page shows
The search box at the top, which is where most visits start. See Finding what you are looking for.
The numbers. The chain head is the most recent block. Average block time is how often a new one appears. Total transactions and total addresses are the running totals since the chain began. Average gas price is what it currently costs to get a transaction included.
Daily transactions, a chart of how busy the chain has been.
Latest blocks and latest transactions, both updating by themselves as new ones arrive. You are watching the chain live.
Getting around
| Menu item | What is behind it |
|---|---|
| Blockchain | Blocks, transactions, statistics, verified contracts and validators |
| Tokens | Every token that has been seen moving on the chain |
| Rich list | Addresses ranked by how much L2P they hold |
| API | Technical access for developers, which you can safely ignore |
Where to go next
If you are here because you sent or received something, go straight to Reading a transaction page. If you want to look at an address, Reading an address page walks through it. And before you act on anything you see here, read Staying safe while you browse.