04 — TRACKING - explorer, mempool, pools, flows

Not on the chain

A shielded address is never serialised onto the chain. There is no balance to look up, no history to list, and no heuristic that begins from one - which is not a limitation of this explorer but the property the pool exists to have. The only way a shielded balance appears on this site is if you hold the key and decrypt it yourself, in this tab, without sending it anywhere.

what a query can return

t-address: exact balance, history, counterparties, boundary events
z or unified address: undefined not on chain - exact with your viewing key
txid: public fields candidate sets, N_eff, links
labels: consensus > owner filing > exchange > analyst > behaviour

mode B - no key - the fog is the resting state

Reading the address from the URL.

mode A - viewing key - decrypted in your browser - never uploaded

Nothing entered. Nothing has been sent, and nothing will be: this field has no network path out of it.

Decryption is gated and arrives in 2.1. The work is a WASM build of the Zcash key and note-encryption libraries, running trial decryption over compact blocks fetched from the gateway - in this tab, with the key never leaving it. It is planned in HANDOFF-13, which stops for approval before any of it is written. Until then this pane renders no balance and no note, because a Mode A that has decrypted nothing has nothing to show, and showing something anyway is what the rest of this site exists to argue against.

What a key does and does not open

TRACKING-MATH section 5

incoming viewing key (IVK): Trial-decrypts every output addressed to you: value, memo, txid, height. It derives no nullifiers, so it can tell you what you received and not what you still hold.
full viewing key (FVK): Adds the nullifier key, so received notes can be matched against published nullifiers. Spent and unspent separate, and the balance becomes exact - the only route by which a shielded balance is ever displayed on this site.
outgoing viewing key (OVK): Decrypts the outgoing ciphertext you wrote when you spent. It shows the recipients and values of your own outgoing transfers, which nothing else can.
none of them reveal: Who sent to you. The sender is not in the note, and no key you hold changes that.

Why the balance is undefined without one

not withheld - undefined

The distinction matters and the site holds to it everywhere. A withheld number is one that exists and is not being shown. An undefined one does not exist to be shown: a shielded balance is the sum of notes whose commitments are in a tree and whose values are inside ciphertexts nobody but the key-holder can open. There is no server that knows it, no analyst who can approximate it, and no arithmetic on public data that gets closer than the whole pool. undefined is the honest pill and it is the one this page uses.

The pool as a whole is a different question and does have an answer: 3,129,287 ZEC in Ironwood at height 3,456,227, 18.5% of supply. Every balance on the pools page is exact, because a pool's total is public even when none of its members is.