Which on-chain events are worth an alert (and which are noise)

A block explorer answers a question you already thought to ask. You open the address, scroll the latest transactions and decide whether anything changed. That works for one wallet you check once a day. It falls apart when you care about a few wallets, a collection and a contract, or when the moment you need to know about is the moment you're not looking.

An alert turns that around: you describe once what to watch and when to speak up, and the message finds you. Alerts arrive within seconds of the transaction being confirmed. Pending (mempool) transactions are not alerted. One message is sent per transaction per rule, and its first line is written to make sense in a phone's notification preview.

The hard part is choosing what deserves a message. The rest of this article is that list.

The first alert worth having is on your own wallet: ETH or tokens arriving, and ETH or tokens leaving. Incoming transfers tell you a payment, a deposit or a withdrawal from an exchange has landed. Outgoing transfers are the ones you want to hear about even more, because an outgoing transfer you didn't make is the first sign something is wrong.

The Protect my wallet template alerts on every transfer in or out. If the wallet is busy, Incoming payments and Treasury outflows split the two directions, and Big moves only keeps transfers at or above a minimum you set, in the asset's own units. Known exchanges and protocols are named in the alert, and other addresses are shortened.

An approval lets another address spend a token from your wallet. Apps need them, but an unlimited approval to the wrong spender is one of the most common ways wallets are drained: the spender can move the whole balance later, without asking again.

The Token approvals template watches a token's contract for Approval events, and the alert flags unlimited allowances with a warning line. Add the condition owner is your wallet to hear only about your own approvals. Approvals across every token a wallet holds are coming with Premium; today you set it up per token.

When a collection mints, you either want to be early or you want to know who got in. A mint is a transfer from the zero address, and the NFT mints template watches the collection's contract for exactly that, on ERC-721 and ERC-1155. Several tokens minted in one transaction arrive as one message with a line per token.

Set the rule up as soon as the contract is deployed, before the mint opens, and nothing is missed while you look for the address.

For your own NFTs, the moment that matters is a token leaving the wallet: a sale going through, a transfer you made yourself, or one you didn't. The NFT received / sent template puts two rules on a wallet, NFT received and NFT sent, so you can send outgoing NFTs to your private chat and keep incoming ones quieter.

To follow one collection instead of one wallet, the NFT activity template watches the collection's contract and alerts on every token that changes hands, like the example below. Add the condition from is one of your wallets to keep only the tokens leaving them.

Big movements of a token are worth a message; small ones usually aren't. The Whale transfers template watches a popular token's contract and only alerts above a threshold set per token, in token units, not USD: for example 1,000,000 USDT, 1,000,000 USDC or 500 WETH.

The alert below comes from the Token transfers template, which sends every transfer of a token. Whale transfers sends the same message, only for transfers at or above the threshold.

Contracts announce the changes that matter most: ownership transferred, the contract paused, a new proposal created in a DAO. These events are rare, so an alert on them costs almost nothing in noise, and when one does fire it is usually worth reading straight away.

Watch a contract you depend on with an event rule on OwnershipTransferred or Paused, or use Admin method called for a contract you operate. For a Governor-style DAO, the New proposals template alerts on every ProposalCreated.

Some alerts look useful when you set them up and become wallpaper after a day. Two common ones:

Every event above has a template in the dashboard, so setting one up is mostly pasting an address. The steps further down walk through it, from sign-in to your first alert. Start with your own wallet: it takes the least thought and catches the most important event on the list.

Before you rely on alerts, these are the edges today:

Everyone who has spent time on-chain has one: a transfer they noticed too late, an approval they forgot, a mint they missed. If yours isn't on this list, it's probably the one worth setting up first, and we'd like to hear what it was.

For a closer look at each kind of alert, start from the alert types or one of the guides below.