Check an IOST transaction or balance with our live explorer

How to use the tracker

The tracker in the hero works with four kinds of input, and it works out which one you pasted by its shape. Paste a mainnet transaction hash (a long string of letters and digits, about 44 characters, with no 0x) and it reads the transaction from the IOST node API. Type an account name such as binance or foundation and it returns that account’s IOST balance, frozen balance, gas and RAM. Paste a 0x address and it checks BEP-20 IOST and BNB on BNB Chain plus BNB on the IOST Layer 2. Paste a 0x transaction hash and it looks on the IOST Layer 2 first, then on BNB Chain.

The three chips under the input are ready-made examples: two well-known accounts and a real mainnet transaction. You can also link straight to a lookup by adding ?q= to the page address, for example /en/explorer?q=deadaddr to see the burn account. Every result card ends with a link to the matching page on IOSTSCAN, BscScan or the L2 explorer, so you can move from our quick view to the full record in one click.

If you get “not found”, the usual cause is a mismatch between the input and the network. A BEP-20 transfer you made from MetaMask has a 0x hash and lives on BNB Chain, while a withdrawal from Coincheck or Upbit is a mainnet transfer with a base58 hash. Exchanges often show the hash under “TxID” in the withdrawal history. If you are not sure which network your IOST is on, our guide to sending IOST explains how the L1 and BEP-20 versions differ.

Reading an L1 transaction

An IOST mainnet transaction has a few parts worth knowing. The status comes in two layers. The receipt’s status code says whether the transaction executed: SUCCESS, or an error. The chain status says how final it is. A transaction first sits in a recent block and becomes IRREVERSIBLE once more than two thirds of the 17 block producers have confirmed it. With 0.5-second blocks, that lag is about half a minute in practice, and the developer docs say around 40 seconds. Exchanges credit deposits only after that point, so a short wait is normal.

The actions list says what the transaction did. A plain transfer calls the contract token.iost with the action transfer, and its data holds five fields: the token (iost), the sender, the recipient, the amount and the memo. The tracker unpacks those for you. Anything else, such as a vote, a contract call by a block producer or a reward payout, shows its contract and action name instead, for example vote_producer.iost. The publisher is the account that signed and paid for the transaction.

The memo matters most for exchange deposits. IOST’s exchange guidelines tell exchanges to use one deposit account for everyone and tell users apart by memo, so the memo is your customer ID. If the tracker shows a SUCCESS transfer to the right exchange account but the memo is empty or wrong, the IOST arrived on-chain and the exchange has to match it to you manually. Send them the hash, amount and time. Finally, the receipt shows gas used. Failed transactions are still recorded and still consume gas, which is why a failed status does not mean nothing happened.

Straight from the nodes

The tracker reads the same public endpoints that wallets use: the IOST node API for the mainnet and public RPC nodes for BNB Chain and the IOST Layer 2. For how blocks and producers work, see IOST technology.

Accounts, gas and RAM

IOST mainnet does not use hex addresses. Each account has a readable name of 5 to 11 characters using lowercase letters, digits and underscores, and every new account must be created by an existing one. Accounts have an owner key, which can change permissions, and an active key for daily transactions. That is why an account lookup in the tracker needs only the name, and why a typo in a recipient name can send IOST to someone else’s real account if that name exists.

Instead of paying a fee per transaction, you pledge IOST to get gas. Pledging 1 IOST gives 100,000 gas at once and another 100,000 per day, up to a cap of 300,000 gas per pledged token. A simple transfer uses about 9,000 gas, so the 10 IOST pledged when an account is created covers roughly 100 transfers a day. Unpledging takes 72 hours. RAM is the other resource: you buy it from the system on a price curve, a 2% fee on purchases is burned, and you can sell it back. In the account card, “frozen” IOST usually means tokens waiting out a 72-hour unpledge or unvote period. The IOST staking guide covers voting, and the wallet guide covers how to create an account.

L2 and BEP-20 lookups

Since IOST 3.0, IOST exists in more than one place, and a lookup only works on the right one. The traded IOST token on BNB Chain is a BEP-20 contract with 18 decimals, used by wallets like MetaMask and Trust Wallet and for StakeDrop. When you paste a 0x address, the tracker calls that contract’s balance function through a public BNB Chain node and shows your BEP-20 IOST next to your BNB. When you paste a 0x hash for a BEP-20 transfer of the official contract, it decodes the recipient and the IOST amount.

The IOST Layer 2 is a separate OP Stack rollup on BNB Chain with chain ID 182, and its gas token is BNB, not IOST. The L2 bridge moves only BNB for now, and the official docs list no IOST token contract on the L2. So for an address on chain 182 the tracker shows its BNB balance only. Don’t be surprised if L2 lookups come back empty: in our research sampling, the network showed almost no user activity. Our IOST 3.0 explainer covers why the L2 and the BEP-20 token are different things.

Need BNB for gas or crypto to start?

CEX.IO, an exchange running since 2013, sells crypto such as BNB by card. It doesn’t list IOST, so you would move what you buy to an exchange that lists IOST or swap for BEP-20 IOST. It doesn’t serve Japan; Japanese residents can use FSA-registered exchanges such as Coincheck.

Grab crypto, then IOST

Official explorers

Our tracker is a quick check. For full histories, use the official explorers. IOSTSCAN is the current official mainnet explorer, and the old iostabc.com address redirects there. It has pages for accounts, transactions, blocks, producers, governance votes and tokens. The legacy explorer.iost.io is still online. For BEP-20 IOST, use BscScan and always check that you are on the official contract page. For the Layer 2, the official explorer is l2-scan.iost.io, which works in a browser but blocks most automated tools.

The IOSTSCAN token list also contains plenty of spam tokens with names like “Fake IOST”, iiost2 or iost_. The real mainnet token is simply iost, and on BNB Chain only the contract above is official. If a balance shows up under any other token, it is not IOST. Our IOST safety check explains the fake-token and fake-airdrop tricks in more detail.

Rich list and holders

IOSTSCAN publishes a holder ranking for the native token, which is what people mean by the IOST rich list. In the snapshot used for our research it counted over 640,000 holder accounts, yet the top 10 accounts held about 72% of the L1 supply and the top 100 almost 97%. The largest is dunamuiost, the custody account of Dunamu, Upbit’s operator, with roughly 30%. Other big names include exchange wallets and what looks like the bridge custody account swap_total. You can type any of these names into the tracker to see their balance live.

Exchange wallets hold coins for thousands of customers, so a concentrated rich list does not mean a few people own IOST. It does mean that what happens at a handful of exchanges moves the market. For the full supply picture, including the 90 billion cap and the IOST 3.0 issuance, see IOST tokenomics.

What the network stats mean

The tracker panel shows the latest head block on the L1 and the L2 when the nodes respond. On the mainnet a new block arrives every half second, and a rising block number simply proves the chain is producing blocks. It says nothing about how many people use it. Most mainnet blocks contain only the system reward transaction that pays the producer.

That is why the headline “TPS” figure needs context. The 2018 whitepaper promised up to 100,000 transactions per second. The highest throughput IOSTSCAN has ever recorded is 3,388 TPS, and on an ordinary day the chain runs at about 2 TPS, which is basically one reward transaction per block. The explorer’s “active users” count tells a similar story: around a hundred accounts in a 24-hour window in our research. Account totals of over a million are cumulative and include dormant accounts. When you read any network statistic, ask whether it measures capacity, history or actual daily use. More on speed and design is on the technology page.

Privacy and safety

The tracker runs entirely in your browser. When you search, your browser sends the query straight to public nodes: the IOST node API at api.iost.io, the IOST Layer 2 RPC and a public BNB Chain node. Those operators can see your IP address and what you looked up, as with any wallet or explorer. We don’t receive or store your searches. Details are in our privacy policy.

A lookup never needs a private key, seed phrase or password, and neither does any legitimate explorer. If a site asks you to “connect” or “verify” a wallet to see a balance, close it. Account names and addresses are public by design, so anyone who knows your account name can see its balance and history. If that bothers you, keep exchange deposits and long-term holdings separate.