If you can't verify it on Etherscan, you don't really own it.
Harsh, but true. The whole point of an NFT is that the chain decides what's real, not a website.
The catch: Etherscan looks like a tax form. Most people bounce on the first scroll. It is not actually that bad. You just need to know what to look at.
The contract address is the front door
For stems.fm, the contract is at 0xA62f445A1171fCfBf76eb44a866c7b48F1a6f226.
Paste it into etherscan.io. The token page comes up. Bookmark it. Everything you'd ever want to know about a stems.fm token starts on this page.
Reading the Contract tab
Click the Contract tab. You'll see Read and Write sub-tabs.
Read is what you want as a collector. Write is for sending transactions, which the stems.fm UI already wraps for you.
Three functions matter: totalSupply, balanceOf, and uri. You're not auditing the contract. You're answering three questions.
Question 1: how many of this token actually exist?
Find totalSupply. Plug in the token ID (the number assigned to a specific stem or song). It returns a count.
That number is the live supply. Not what was minted originally. What exists right now, after burns.
If it's lower than the original mint amount, someone forged with it. Permanently. The chain remembers.
Question 2: who holds this, and how much?
Use balanceOf with an address + token ID. Returns the count that address holds.
Not as useful for whale-watching, since ERC-1155 spreads across many holders. But great for sanity-checking your own wallet against what stems.fm shows. If they disagree, trust Etherscan.
Question 3: what is this token, actually?
Use the uri function with a token ID. It returns a JSON metadata link.
Open that link. You'll see the stem name, the song it belongs to, the type (drums, strings, vocals, etc.), and the audio CID.
This is the source of truth for what the NFT represents. Anything stems.fm displays is rendered from this. Anything that disagrees with this is wrong.
The Token tab is the cheat code
Skip the Contract tab for a second. Click the Token tab at the top of the contract page.
You get a list of token IDs, holder counts, and recent transfers. Easiest way to scan what's actually moving.
Recent transfers tell you if a token is active or stale. A Song token with four transfers this week is being shopped around. One with nothing in six months is sitting deep in a wallet.
How to confirm a forge actually happened
Forging burns tokens. Burns show up as transfers to 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 — the zero address. The convention every chain uses for "this token is gone."
On the contract's Transfers tab, filter "To: 0x0000...0000". Every entry is a stem or song that got burned to forge something higher tier.
Counting those transfers tells you exactly how much supply has been destroyed since launch. The number only goes one direction.
A short example before you buy
Say you want to grab a Song token on OpenSea for $400. Before you click Buy, do this:
- Look up the Song token ID on Etherscan. Check totalSupply. If it returns 6, six exist in the world.
- Check the burn count for stems that feed into it. If 60 stems burned and 6 Song tokens exist, the math checks out at roughly 10 stems per song.
- Glance at the Token tab transfer history. Has it moved recently? At what prices?
Now you know what you're buying. Not the OpenSea card. The actual onchain object.
When the chain and the site disagree
Trust the chain. Sites cache. RPC nodes lag. Etherscan can be 30 seconds behind reality and stems.fm can be 30 seconds behind Etherscan.
Wait, refresh, check again. If the gap doesn't close, the website is wrong and the chain is right. That's not a bug. That's the whole reason this exists.
Bookmarks worth keeping
- The stems.fm contract page on Etherscan (0xA62f445A1171fCfBf76eb44a866c7b48F1a6f226)
- etherscan.io/gastracker for timing your next mint
- Your own wallet address as a watched page for fast checks
- Whitepaper: "Stems: A New Layer for Valuing Music" by Kyler Simzer for the why behind everything you'll see onchain
Read the contract once. The rest is just looking up token IDs.
