Overview
Cardanoscan Pending Transactions is a live page showing transfers that have been sent to the network but not yet written into a block. Anyone who has just hit send can look here and see that their transfer reached the network at all. The list clears as transactions are picked up into blocks, and how long any one waits varies.
The page belongs to Cardanoscan, a block explorer for Cardano built by Strica, the development company behind the Typhon Wallet. It sits directly above the confirmed-transactions list in the explorer's own menu, so a reader can follow a transaction across from one to the other.
Key Features
- See a transfer before it is confirmed. Each transaction the explorer sees waiting gets a row, and clicking its ID opens that transaction's full detail page1.
- See how much this explorer's node is holding. A counter above the table gives the number of transactions waiting in Cardanoscan's own queue at that moment1. Because every Cardano node keeps its own queue rather than sharing one2, the figure is that node's view, not a network-wide total.
- Follow the money while it is still in flight. Each row names the addresses a transaction spends from and the addresses it pays, the fee paid in ADA, and the total output — a figure that includes any change returning to a sender, so it is not the amount handed over. The addresses link through to their own pages1.
- A fee column that is a receipt, not a bid. Cardano works out a fee from a fixed formula based on transaction size, so there are no gas auctions and no bidding for a faster spot3. The number reports what a transfer cost.
- The same view on the test networks. Cardanoscan runs this page on its preprod4 and preview5 explorers as well, so developers can watch a submission queue and clear without spending real funds.
What to Expect
You land on a plain table with a count above it. Each row carries a transaction ID, the addresses the transaction spends from and pays to, the fee, and the total output. There is no timestamp and no block number, because a transaction has neither until it is recorded. Those columns are what the confirmed-transactions list next door adds1. There are no pages to click through either; reload to see where the queue stands.
Rows vanish for two reasons. Most get picked up into a block. The rest are dropped: a node, meaning one of the computers running Cardano, re-checks what is waiting whenever the chain updates and quietly discards any that no longer work, at no cost to the sender6.
The waiting area is called the mempool, short for memory pool, the space in a computer's memory where a node parks transactions it has heard about but not yet seen in a block. Cardano keeps no single shared mempool: each node holds its own and passes transactions to its neighbours2. So Cardanoscan shows the queue its own machine can see, and a wallet or a rival explorer may list a slightly different set at the same instant. Strica built the view after proposing it through Project Catalyst, Cardano's community funding programme, arguing that people submitting transactions during congestion had no way to see where they stood7.
