Evidence, not promises
How to read ErgoScan
ErgoScan separates chain facts, deterministic decoding, service telemetry, live observations, estimates, and external sources so that similar-looking numbers do not make identical claims.
Six evidence classes
The badge beside a statement tells you what can be independently reproduced and what can still change.
Confirmed blocks, transactions, boxes, and assets read from the ErgoScan Postgres index.
Public rules recognize known contracts or derive effects from their boxes. The rule version matters.
Health, cursor, lag, and freshness reported by a running service. Telemetry is checked against upstream heights and time.
A bounded estimate when the chain record is not enough to be sure. Collected storage rent is not in this class: it is an empty proof plus extension 127.
A gateway RAM observation from the mempool. A reorganization or replacement can change it.
A value or project status published elsewhere, with the source linked explicitly.
Read an eUTXO transaction
A transaction does not edit account balances. It consumes existing boxes and creates new boxes.
- 01
Inputs are spent
Every input points to a previous box. That box can be consumed only once.
- 02
Outputs are created
ERG, tokens, scripts, and registers move into a new set of boxes.
- 03
The fee is an output
Wallets pay the standard miners-fee contract. That is not a hidden account deduction, and paying a fee is not the same as collecting one.
- 04
The miner collects later
A later transaction in the same block spends those fee boxes and pays one 720-lock miner-reward output. That is fee collection, not a transfer.
- 05
A repeated address is not proof
An address on both sides may indicate change or consolidation; it does not prove ownership or intent.
What ErgoScan will not pretend to know
Unknown is a valid result. Labels are narrower than the evidence behind them.
- A box flow does not reveal the human purpose of a transaction.
- An address label or cluster does not prove the real-world owner.
- On-chain data cannot prove off-chain bridge, order, or application states.
- Home “Live nodes” is not a census of the Ergo network. It is this node’s TCP sessions plus hosts the hourly crawl found reachable in the last two hours. Peers that never advertise an address do not appear. Another explorer’s list is a different sample.
Reproduce the claim
Use Status for freshness and coverage, then open the public API or GraphQL response behind an entity or metric. GraphQL reads the same index as REST.