How to Read Block Explorers and Understand Transactions, Traces, and Logs (EVM)

This guide explains how to read Ethereum block explorer pages, including transactions, event logs, and traces, and how to work with them in SQL on Dune. It states that the transaction fields, such as whether the "to" address is a contract, are the foundation for Ethereum data analysis. The guide describes the function signature as the first 4 bytes of input data, encoded per the ABI specification, and says events have topic0 (32 bytes) plus indexed topics and a data field. It lists four trace types: CREATE, DELEGATECALL, CALL and STATICCALL, and explains that trace_address arrays show call depth and order. The author notes that Dune cannot join on index to recreate exact interaction ordering, and recommends Phalcon for viewing traces.