How I Track Wallets and Hunt NFTs on Solana — A Practical Look at solscan

Whoa! I landed on Solana tooling a few years ago and something felt off at first. My instinct said „fast chain, fast mess“ — and that was before I dug into explorers. Seriously? The surface looks simple, but the more you poke, the more tiny details start to matter.

Here’s the thing. Explorers are rarely neutral utilities. They shape what you look at, how you investigate, and even how you attribute trust. I use solscan every day for debugging transactions, tracing token flows, and verifying NFT provenance. At first I thought the problem was just UX quirks, but then I realized it’s also about the data model and how Solana records state — accounts, programs, and a ton of parallelism that other chains don’t have.

Okay, so check this out — when you open an account on solscan you get a quick synopsis: balances, recent txs, and token snapshots. That’s the sugar. But the real utility is the breadcrumbs: program logs, instruction decoding, and the on-chain signatures that point to cross-program interactions. Those are the things that tell you if an NFT transfer actually completed, or if a marketplace program only emitted an event but didn’t finalize a state change.

Why wallet tracking on Solana is its own animal

Short version: accounts own data, not contracts. That matters. On Ethereum you often follow smart contracts; on Solana you follow accounts and PDAs (Program Derived Addresses). So when you’re tracking a wallet or NFT, you need to watch account creation, token metadata updates, and rent-exempt balances. It’s nitty-gritty and very important if you’re doing forensic work.

Initially I thought scanning hashes and timestamps would be enough, but then I had to rewire my approach. Actually, wait — let me rephrase that: timestamps help, but they don’t tell the whole story. You need instruction-level detail. On one hand it feels like overkill; on the other hand, though actually, without it you miss subtle failed instructions that still look noisy in a transaction list.

I’m biased, but solscan nails the middle ground of readability and depth. It decodes many program instructions for you, and when it doesn’t, you can still inspect raw logs. That saved me from a couple of embarrassing blame-games where a marketplace claimed an NFT transfer while the buyer, well, never received the token. Somethin‘ as simple as a partially processed instruction can create days of confusion.

Practical tips I use daily

1) Start with the transaction ID. Always. It’s your atomic unit.

2) Check the instruction list. If a transfer instruction is present, look for post-token balances right after the block. Don’t trust event logs alone.

3) Follow inner instructions — the ones nested several layers deep. They often contain SPL token mint or metadata updates that get missed by summaries.

One quick example: a creator minted a limited edition NFT, then ran a batch transfer to collectors. At first glance the txs showed success. But a closer look at the inner instructions revealed a race condition in the minting script that left a handful of PDAs uninitialized. Collectors saw an „owned“ status, yet their wallets couldn’t display metadata. That was a nightmare. We tracked it on solscan and corrected metadata manually — not ideal, but doable.

(oh, and by the way… using the block time filter and program filters makes audits faster.)

Solscan features that actually help

Solscan isn’t just a block viewer. It offers token explorers, NFT galleries, and targeted search tools. I use the token tracker for supply checks, and the NFT explorer to verify metadata URIs, creators, and royalty flags. If you want a quick entry point to any of this, solscan is where I start.

Something that bugs me: not all metadata is hosted reliably. Those off-chain links can rot, or point to IPFS gateways that throttle. So, when auditing an NFT collection, I cross-check URIs and snapshot the JSON. If a URI points to a mutable host, that’s a red flag for provenance-sensitive collectors. I’m not 100% sure how many people do this, but they should.

Also, watch royalties. Marketplaces sometimes mis-handle royalty enforcement, so a look at the creators array and seller fee basis points is necessary. It’s tedious maybe, but it’s the kind of thing that keeps you out of disputes.

Wallet tracker workflows

My daily workflow is simple and iterative. First, load the public key. Then scan recent txs for large token movements or contract interactions. Filter by program ID to narrow down marketplace or bridge activity. If something looks off, expand the tx and inspect logs. Often the logs tell the story the indexer summaries hide.

On one hand this feels manual. On the other hand, it’s reassuring — you build intuition about how certain programs behave. After a while you can glance at a tx signature and say „yep, that’s a liquidity withdrawal“ before you even expand it. That muscle memory is worth cultivating.

My instinct said automation would replace this, but in practice, automation without human validation tends to miss edge cases. Machine checks are great for scale; human checks are still needed for nuance. Balance it. Use automation for alerts and humans for the messy bits.

I’m finishing with a small confession: I still get surprised. New programs show up, metas change, and sometimes a marketplace invents a novel swap pattern that requires re-learning. But that unpredictability is why I enjoy this work. It keeps you curious and a little humble.

So yeah — use solscan. Build workflows that combine automation and human review. Keep snapshots of metadata. And when something looks fishy, dig into inner instructions before you panic. You’ll save time, and maybe some headaches.