Overview
Cardanoscan is a free lookup site for a public blockchain ledger: paste in a transaction, a wallet address, a token or a stake pool and see what the network recorded about it1. It suits anyone who wants to confirm a transfer went through, as well as developers who need the same records in bulk. It also covers on-chain voting, giving proposals and the representatives who vote on them their own browsable pages2.
The site indexes the Cardano mainnet and is built by Strica, the team behind the Typhon wallet and a set of open-source Cardano code libraries3. Separate instances run against Cardano's test networks, so builders can inspect their work before it touches the live chain45.
Key Features
- Look up what the chain has recorded. One search bar reaches blocks, transactions, addresses, epochs, tokens, certificates and stake pools, and each block row names the pool that produced it, how many transactions it holds and the total value moved1.
- Follow Cardano's on-chain voting. Governance pages list each proposal by type (treasury withdrawal, committee change, protocol parameter change) and by whether it is live, enacted or expired2. A separate directory covers DReps, the delegated representatives who vote on behalf of ADA holders, with a registration and last-active date for each6.
- Watch payments before they settle. A pending-transactions page shows what is sitting in the queue, with inputs, outputs and fees, before any of it is folded into a block7.
- Decode the fine print of a transaction. A datum inspector renders a datum, the structured data attached to a transaction output that a smart contract reads, in both a parsed and a decoded view8, and a companion tool breaks a Cardano address down into its component parts9.
- Pull the same data into your own software. The Cardanoscan API, an interface built for programs rather than people, serves the explorer's records behind an access key, with a free tier, paid tiers above it, and official Python and TypeScript toolkits1011.
What to Expect
You land on a search bar with the network's pulse underneath it: progress through the epoch in play, the newest blocks and the newest transactions, each row clickable through to a full record1. Typing an address, a transaction hash or a pool name gets you readable tables rather than raw code.
Coverage is broad rather than specialist. Chart pages track epoch rewards, daily transactions and fees, and average block size12. Cardano's governance system lets ADA holders vote on protocol changes themselves or hand that vote to a representative, and Cardanoscan turns that activity into browsable lists, down to the constitutional committee that weighs proposals against Cardano's constitution13.
For developers there is a second layer. The API grew out of a Project Catalyst proposal aimed at sparing people from running their own indexing infrastructure14, and the team's code libraries reach further than the explorer: an interview on the Cardano Developer Portal records that Strica built the Cardano support inside Ledger Live15. Test-network explorers for preview and preprod mirror the main interface45. There is no blog or whitepaper here, and questions go through the site's contact form or Strica's shared community Discord server.
