Explore Optimism with Blockscout: Tools Built for the Network

Optimism is one of the leading Ethereum scaling solutions, designed to make onchain activity faster and more affordable while preserving Ethereum’s security guarantees. As the ecosystem grows, users and developers need more than raw throughput, they need clear visibility into what is happening inside the rollup.

The Blockscout explorer for Optimism delivers that visibility through an ongoing, extensive collaboration with the Optimism team. Aligned with the network’s roadmap, it goes beyond core search and contract tools to provide a broad set of features tailored for the rollup, helping everyone from everyday users to protocol developers trace transactions, monitor batches, and understand network health.

Always Up to Date with Optimism Upgrades

Blockscout has supported Optimism through every major network upgrade, working side-by-side to ensure our block explorers remain accurate as the protocol evolves.

Recent milestones include:

• Delta: reduced fixed costs and improved batching efficiency.
• Ecotone: transitioned batch data into EIP-4844 blobs, lowering costs and improving data availability
• Fjord: added support for new crypto primitives (EIP-7212)
• Holocene: aligned explorer indexers with Optimism’s January 2025 upgrade
• Isthmus: reflected new operator fee formulas in transaction pages

By tracking protocol changes in real time, Blockscout ensures developers and users always have an explorer that reflects the current state of Optimism.

Rollup Specific Visibility Tools

Deposits and Withdrawals

Bridging assets between Ethereum and Optimism is one of the most common user flows. Blockscout surfaces dedicated views for deposits and withdrawals, making it simple to follow funds as they move between L1 and L2. Each entry links to both sides of the bridge, giving users confidence that their assets have arrived.

Transaction Batches

Optimism groups L2 transactions into batches before posting them to Ethereum. Blockscout provides a transaction batch explorer view, allowing users to inspect which transactions were included, when they were submitted, and how they connect to the L1.

Dispute Games

Fault proofs are a core component of Optimism’s long term security model. With the OP dispute games view, anyone can inspect active and past disputes directly in the explorer, offering transparency into how challenges to rollup state are resolved.

Flashblocks

For applications like DeFi, payments, or gaming, waiting even a second for confirmation can feel slow. Optimism’s flashblocks module solves this by providing sub second pre confirmations of transactions. Instead of waiting for a full block to finalize, users and developers get near instant feedback, often in 250ms.

Flashblocks work by breaking the block building process into smaller intervals and streaming partial updates. On the OP block explorer, there is a dedicated flashblocks view under the ‘blocks’ section, complete with a dynamic real-time feed, average flashblock time, and of course individual logs for each flashblock and the associated onchain operations.

Fee Transparency

Every transaction on Optimism combines L2 execution costs with L1 data posting costs. On the transactions page, you can inspect any transaction and see a clear fee breakdown directly on the transaction page.

The explorer surfaces details like:

• L1 gas used and L1 gas price
• The exact L1 fee charged
• Standard L2 gas usage and fees
• The Operator fee, introduced with the Isthmus upgrade to make fee structures more customizable

This makes it easy to understand what portion of the cost comes from Ethereum and what comes from Optimism itself, giving users complete transparency into how fees are calculated.

Withdrawal Finalization

Optimism withdrawals follow a multi-step process that includes proving, waiting out the challenge period, and finally relaying the transaction back to Ethereum. On the withdrawals page, Blockscout tracks each step with clear status labels like Waiting for state root, Ready to prove and Relayed.

When a withdrawal reaches the Ready for relay stage, the explorer provides a direct link to complete the finalization. In upcoming updates users will be able to finalize transactions directly from their wallet within the explorer UI.

By surfacing withdrawal progress and enabling finalization in one place, Blockscout simplifies a process that is otherwise spread across multiple tools and makes bridging activity more transparent for users.

Advanced Block Explorer Features for Optimism Users

Optimism’s Blockscout block explorer includes the full set of advanced explorer tools, such as:

• Token transfers: searchable history of ERC-20 activity.
• Internal transactions: visibility into contract calls happening beneath the surface.
• Advanced filtering: drill down by method, address, or token type.
• User Operations (ERC-4337): full visibility into account abstraction activity, including creation, bundling, and execution of UserOps.
• Gas tracker: real time and historical gas price data.
• Onchain Stats: charts for network activity across tokens, txs, users, and smart contracts

Together these tools make it simple to analyze Optimism at every level, from individual transfers to network wide trends.

Developer Centric Enhancements

Expanded APIs

Blockscout’s Optimism APIs give developers fine grained access to onchain data including:

• ERC-721 token transfer events.
• Contract creator and creation transaction hash.
• Source code and proxy contract verification.
• ERC-20 account balances for any contract.

Predeployed Contract Recognition

Optimism relies on a set of predeployed system contracts that are critical to the rollup’s operation, such as managing L1 block data and bridging. Blockscout automatically recognizes and verifies these contracts, so developers can explore them without manual setup.

For example, the L1Block contract is a core predeploy that provides Optimism with Ethereum block context. On Blockscout it appears fully verified, with source code and contract details available to review.

This auto-recognition makes it easier for developers to understand how Optimism works under the hood, and ensures system-level contracts are always transparent and accessible.

Seamless Integration with Developer Tooling

Blockscout is not just a standalone block explorer, it is integrated directly into the development workflows that Optimism builders already use.

• Ethers.js provider: Blockscout can be selected as a data provider in Ethers.js. This makes it simple for developers to pull live Optimism data into their dapps, scripts, or backend services without additional configuration.
• Contract verification flows: Blockscout supports verification through Sourcify and Vyper, alongside Solidity JSON formats. Developers can publish contracts written in multiple languages and confirm them on Optimism with minimal friction.
• Proxy contract support: When verifying contracts, Blockscout can automatically detect and link proxy implementations, saving developers time in auditing and debugging.

These integrations mean that Optimism developers do not need to learn a new workflow to take advantage of Blockscout. The explorer fits directly into the existing tooling ecosystem while extending transparency and verification features specific to Optimism.

Data and UX Innovations

Blobs (EIP-4844)

With the Ecotone upgrade in Mar 14, 2024, Optimism began posting transaction batches into EIP-4844 blobs, a new Ethereum data space designed for rollups. Instead of storing batch data in calldata, blobs make data availability cheaper and more scalable.

Blockscout surfaces these blobs directly in batch and transaction views. Users and developers can inspect the raw data that anchors Optimism’s L2 activity to Ethereum, improving transparency around how rollup transactions are secured.

ERC-4337 User Operations

Smart wallets are becoming more common on Optimism, powered by account abstraction (ERC-4337). These transactions look different from standard Ethereum calls, since they involve a “user operation” flow through bundlers. ERC-4337 operations now appear directly alongside standard transactions, giving developers and users full visibility into how smart wallet activity is executed on L2.

Real Time Updates

Blockscout brings Optimism’s activity to life with live updates via websockets. Transaction lists, block feeds, and homepage counters refresh automatically, so new activity appears the moment it is confirmed.

This turns the explorer into a real-time dashboard for the network, where users can watch transactions, blocks, and stats stream in continuously. For active DeFi users, builders, or anyone tracking the chain, it creates a smoother and more dynamic experience.

Analytics and Growth Metrics

Beyond single transactions, explorers are also about seeing the bigger picture. Blockscout surfaces analytics for EOAs and contracts, including balance history, highest and lowest balances, contract growth, and verified contract counts.

These views make it easier to measure OP adoption: how fast new contracts are being deployed, how balances shift over time, and how developer activity is trending. It provides a snapshot of ecosystem health in a format that is open and verifiable.

Exploring Interop

Blockscout participated in Optimism’s Interop incubator, hosting dedicated explorers for builders experimenting with cross chain applications. These explorers included message tracking and interpretation tools, giving teams visibility into early interop flows and demonstrating how new functionality could be surfaced directly in the explorer.

This work highlights how closely Blockscout collaborates with Optimism, ensuring that even experimental features are accessible and transparent for developers from the very beginning.

Start Exploring Optimism

All of these features are live today on explorer.optimism.io. From bridging and batches to dispute games, Flashblocks, and blob data, Blockscout captures the full scope of Optimism’s rollup activity.

And there’s more coming soon: we’re already working with Optimism on the upcoming multichain explorer. Stay tuned for the next step in making onchain activity clearer, giving developers a unified view of activity across the Superchain.

As Optimism evolves, the explorer stands as an open window into the network, giving every user and builder the clarity they need to trust, verify, and grow onchain.