A friend asked me last month how much I pay for wallet-tracking tools, and the honest answer surprised him. For following a single address, or even a handful, I pay nothing. The block explorer every chain ships with does most of what people imagine the paid dashboards do. You paste an address and everything that wallet has ever done is sitting there in public. The paid tools add labels, clustering, and alerts on top, which is real value at scale, but for watching one specific wallet you care about, you can build the same habit yourself for free. The catch is that explorers are built for developers first, so the useful parts hide behind tabs with unhelpful names.
Etherscan first, because everything else copies it
Go to etherscan.io and paste the address into the search bar. The overview panel shows the ETH balance, its rough dollar value, and a token holdings dropdown. Open that dropdown with some suspicion. Anyone can send any token to any address, so a wallet holding a few blue chips will also hold a dozen junk tokens with names designed to look like airdrops. My rule is simple, if I cannot verify a token has a real market, I treat it as bait. Some of those tokens exist purely to get you to visit a phishing site printed in the token name, so never interact with them, and never trust the dollar values shown for illiquid tokens.
Below the overview, the tabs do the real work. The Transactions tab shows normal transactions where this address paid the gas. Internal Transactions shows ETH moved by smart contracts on the wallet's behalf, which is where a lot of DeFi activity actually lives. Token Transfers is usually the most informative tab for a trading wallet, because it lists every token in and out with amounts, timestamps, and counterparties. NFT movements get their own tabs.
Counterparties are where this gets interesting. Click through to the address on the other side of any large transfer. Etherscan labels a surprising number of them, exchange deposit wallets, known protocols, bridges, funds. A big transfer to an address tagged as a Binance or Coinbase deposit wallet often precedes a sale, though I have watched enough large holders to know it sometimes means nothing, some people use exchanges as an expensive savings account.
One genuinely underrated feature, make a free Etherscan account and add the address to your watch list. It will email you when the address transacts. For the single-wallet case, that replaces the alerting feature people pay for elsewhere.
Solana, same idea, different plumbing
Solscan works the same way on the surface. Paste the address, get balances, tokens, and history. Two things trip people up. First, on Solana your tokens do not sit in your wallet address directly. Each token lives in its own token account, a separate address owned by your main one. Solscan flattens this in the portfolio view, but if you follow a specific transfer you will sometimes land on a token account page instead of the owner. Look for the owner field and click through to get back to the wallet you actually care about.
Second, fees on Solana are close to zero, so wallet spam is much heavier than on Ethereum. Active wallets get dusted with junk tokens and junk NFTs constantly. When you read transfer history, filter by the specific token you care about, otherwise the noise buries the signal. The DeFi activities view on Solscan is also worth learning, it decodes swaps into a readable swapped-this-for-that format, which saves you from squinting at raw instruction data.
Bitcoin, stop thinking in balances
Bitcoin explorers feel familiar, I like mempool.space, but the accounting model underneath is different and it changes what tracking even means. Ethereum and Solana are account-based, an address has a balance the way a bank account does. Bitcoin is a pile of unspent transaction outputs. When a wallet spends, it consumes whole outputs and sends the leftover back to itself at a fresh change address. So the address you were given often drops to zero after a single spend, and the funds continue at addresses nobody told you about.
That has two practical consequences. A Bitcoin address going to zero is usually just normal change handling by the wallet software, so resist reading it as a sale. And since most modern wallets rotate receiving addresses too, the address someone shares with you is one of many. Following an anonymous personal Bitcoin wallet properly means either having their extended public key, which nobody sane shares, or manually chasing change outputs, which is doable for a lazy wallet and turns into genuine forensics for an active one. In practice I track labeled Bitcoin addresses, exchange cold wallets, long-dormant coins, published treasury addresses, and accept that Bitcoin makes personal wallets hard to follow by design.
The routine, condensed
Here is the whole thing as a repeatable loop.
- Bookmark the explorer page for each address you follow, one folder per wallet if it spans chains.
- On Etherscan, set the free watch-list email alert so checking stops depending on your memory.
- Read tabs in a fixed order, token transfers first, then normal transactions, then internal transactions. Large moves surface in transfers first.
- For any big transfer, open the counterparty. A labeled exchange address suggests buying or selling. A fresh unlabeled address usually means internal reshuffling, so note it and wait.
- Ignore any token you cannot verify. Do not click it, do not swap it, do not claim it.
- Keep a dated note file of what you saw. Patterns show up over weeks, never in one visit.
The note file sounds beneath everyone's dignity, and it is the most useful item on the list. When a wallet that has done nothing for months suddenly moves, your record of the nothing is what tells you the move matters.
Where the free routine runs out is scale. One wallet by hand is easy. Fifty wallets across three chains, with labels and alerts and pattern detection, is roughly why we built whale tracking into Blockcircle. But start manual anyway. A few weeks of reading raw explorer pages teaches you what every dashboard is summarizing, and you will catch things the summaries flatten out.