How to detect anyone buy how much my tokens

Question

Scenario: User will signup on my website example.com and then they need to buy my tokens to use my website so I have created my own ERC20 tokens(ShahzadTestCoin), but my problem is how can I detect someone buy how much token using javascript or php code? Is there any api which will inform me that some user has purchased tokens?

Also I need to save how much tokens are keep each user in my own database, would it be good idea?

My tokens address: https://ropsten.etherscan.io/address/0xc61bec3497e549b9fa58ae79a5a573e064fe3311

Please give some better advise

Answer 1

(Note, all examples are tested with web3 1.0.0-beta*)

ERC20 Transfer Event Signature

ERC20 has the event Transfer(address,address,uint256) you can use to track token transferring logs. In order to filter all Transfer events, you need to get the event signature through one of these two ways:

const ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT_ABI = {
    name: 'Transfer',
    type: 'event',
    inputs: [{
        type: 'address',
        name: 'from',
        indexed: true
    }, {
        type: 'address',
        name: 'to',
        indexed: true
    }, {
        type: 'uint256',
        name: 'value',
    }]
};
const ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT = Web3.utils.sha3('Transfer(address,address,uint256)');
console.log("ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT hash", ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT);
const ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT2 = web3.eth.abi.encodeEventSignature(ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT_ABI);
console.log("ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT2 hash", ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT2);

Historical logs

To track historical logs, you need to connect to a full archive node first. You could also use infura.io as a provider.

Once you connect to the provider with full archive, you can then use web3 getPastLogs api:

function toHex(n) {
    return '0x' + Number(n).toString(16);
}
async function list() {
    for (let i = FROM_BLOCK/100; i < TO_BLOCK/100; ++i) {
        let f = i * 100;
        let t = f + 99;
        await web3.eth.getPastLogs({
            fromBlock: toHex(f),
            toBlock: toHex(t),
            address: YOUR_TOKEN_ADDRESS,
            topics: [
                ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT
            ]
        }, (error, result) => {
            if (error) { console.error(error); return; }
            console.log(`[${f}:${t}] ${result.length}`);
            result.forEach(log => {
                let dlog = web3.eth.abi.decodeLog(ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT_ABI.inputs, log.data, log.topics.slice(1))
                console.log(`   ${dlog.from} -> ${dlog.to} : ${dlog.value}`);
            });
        });
    }
}

Live Log Subscription

You need to connect to a provider with the subscription support, and also through a WebSocket transport. Once you manage to do that, you can subscribe to live log updates:

function subscribe_erc20_logs() {
    let sub = web3.eth.subscribe('logs', {
        address: YOUR_TOKEN_ADDRESS,
        topics: [
            ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT
        ]
    }, function (error, log) {
        if (error) { console.error(error); return; }
        let dlog = web3.eth.abi.decodeLog(ERC20_TRANSFER_EVENT_ABI.inputs, log.data, log.topics.slice(1))
        console.log(`new log: ${dlog.from} -> ${dlog.to} : ${dlog.value}`);
    });
}

Offchain database

Regarding your question about offchain database, I think you could also keep a address -> token_amount mapping in one of your token contract. Keeping a offchain database is fine for other more complex view of the blockchain history, as long as you handle properly the potential bugs which could lead to inconsistency between blockchain and your database.