Book Image

Learn Ethereum

By : Xun (Brian) Wu, Zhihong Zou, Dongying Song
Book Image

Learn Ethereum

By: Xun (Brian) Wu, Zhihong Zou, Dongying Song

Overview of this book

Ethereum is a blockchain-based, decentralized computing platform that allows running smart contracts. This book provides a basic overview of how Ethereum works, its ecosystem, mining process, and the consensus mechanism. It also demonstrates a step-by-step approach for building decentralized applications. This book begins with the very basics of Blockchain technology. Then it dives deep into the Ethereum architecture, framework and tools in its ecosystem. It also provides you an overview of ongoing research on Ethereum, for example, Layer 1 and 2 scaling solution, Stablecoin, ICO/STO/IEO, etc. Next, it explains Solidity language in detail, and provides step-by-step instructions for designing, developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring decentralized applications. In addition, you’ll learn how to use Truffle, Remix, Infura, Metamask, and many other Ethereum technologies. It’ll also help you develop your own cryptocurrency by creating ERC20, and ERC721 smart contracts from scratch. Finally, we explain private blockchains, and you learn how to interact with smart contracts through wallets.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Blockchain and Ethereum Basics
5
Section 2: Blockchain Development Cycle
8
Section 3: Ethereum Implementations
12
Section 4: Production and Deployment
16
Section 5: Conclusion

Monitoring smart contracts

Etherscan is one of the popular block explorers. What is an Ethereum blockchain explorer? They are services that let you browse the Ethererum blockchain (mainnet) and testnets. Information on the address, transaction hash, block, contracts, token, and other on-chain activities can be found on block explorers.

There are a few mainstream block explorers, such as the following:

  • Etherscan: https://etherscan.io
  • Etherchain:https://www.etherchain.org
  • Blockscout: https://blockscout.com/poa/core/
  • Smart contract watch: https://github.com/Neufund/smart-contract-watch

Etherscan is the original block explorer. It provides almost anything you could possibly need. Let's take a tour of Etherscan:

  1. First of all, you have to choose the network that you will be using. The default page is the mainnet.
  2. Click on the Ethereum symbol on the right-hand corner to switch...