Checking Your Transactions

On a transparent blockchain, checking a payment is easy and a little creepy: you paste an address or transaction ID into a public explorer and see everything. Monero deliberately makes that impossible — there is no public explorer that can reveal your balance. So how do you actually confirm a payment arrived or that you sent the right amount? In this lesson you will learn the Monero way: verifying funds with your own wallet, your transaction secret key, and your view key.

Your Wallet Is the Source of Truth

Because amounts and parties are hidden on-chain, only someone with the right keys can decode your transactions — and that someone is you. Your wallet holds those keys, scans the blockchain, and reconstructs your real picture:

• Your balance and which portion is unlocked versus still locked.
• A list of incoming and outgoing transactions with dates and amounts.
• The number of confirmations each transaction has accumulated.

This is the everyday tool. When you want to know "did it arrive?", you open your wallet and watch the transaction appear and its confirmations climb — no third-party website required.

Why There's No Public Balance Lookup

The same privacy that protects you also protects everyone else. Stealth addresses mean your address never appears on-chain, ring signatures obscure senders, and RingCT hides amounts. Block explorers for Monero exist, but they show only generic structure — they cannot decode your balance or tie payments to you. Well-known Monero explorers — many catalogued in Monerica's Blockchain Explorers directory — include xmrchain.net — the explorer the Kraken exchange points its users to — plus exploremonero.com and xmrscan.org. On any of them you can paste a transaction ID and see that it exists, when it confirmed, its fee and its ring size — but never who sent it, who received it, or how much. This is a feature: disclosure on Monero is always deliberate and targeted, never the default.

Verifying a Specific Incoming Payment

Sometimes you need more than "my wallet shows a deposit" — you want to verify a particular payment from a particular sender. Monero gives you two precise tools:

• The transaction secret key (tx key). When a sender creates a transaction, their wallet generates a one-time secret tied to it. The sender can share this tx key along with the transaction ID and destination address, letting you (or anyone) confirm that this exact transaction paid that exact address that exact amount — without exposing either wallet.
• Your view key. Because the private view key can see incoming funds, you can use it to prove and audit what your address has received. This is also how a watch-only wallet works.

These targeted methods are formalized as payment proofs, which we cover in their own lesson.

Reading Your Transaction List

When you look at a transaction in your wallet, the key details to understand are:

1. Direction — incoming (received) or outgoing (sent).
2. Amount and fee — for outgoing transactions you also see the fee you paid.
3. Confirmations — how settled it is; received funds unlock after 10 confirmations (~20 minutes).
4. Transaction ID — a reference you can use with a tx key to prove the payment later.

If a received amount shows but you cannot spend it yet, it is simply still within the 10-block lock — wait a few blocks. Organizing many incoming payments is much easier when you use subaddresses and accounts, which let you label and separate streams of funds.

Practical Tips

• Always verify in your own wallet, not on a website that claims to show Monero balances — it cannot.
• Keep the transaction ID for important payments so you can request or generate a proof later.
• Let confirmations build before treating a large payment as final.
• Use a remote or your own node consciously; how you connect affects privacy, as in Running or Choosing a Node.

For step-by-step instructions, the official user guides walk through proving payments and restoring wallets.

Checking your Monero transactions is a shift in mindset: instead of a public ledger anyone can read, you hold the keys to your own private view. Your wallet answers everyday questions, and tx keys and view keys handle the rest when you need to prove something. Next we will make all this far tidier with Subaddresses and Accounts.