You can read blocks and transactions as separate concepts and still feel lost when a wallet shows “pending”, “confirmed”, or “dropped”. This guide is the missing glue: one clean story that connects each stage into a single system-level pipeline. The goal is not to teach consensus or finality. It is to explain how your action becomes ordered blockchain history — and why that history is not immediately final.
The Pipeline (One Pass)
- User intent: “send 0.1 ETH to Alice”
- Transaction: a signed proposal that encodes that intent in protocol fields
- Propagation: the transaction spreads peer-to-peer; different nodes learn about it at different times
- Mempool: each node holds a local set of pending proposals it currently knows about
- Block: a block orders and batches many proposals into a candidate history step
- Confirmations: additional blocks on top increase the cost of rewriting that history
Key mental model: visibility ≠ inclusion. Seeing a transaction does not guarantee it will be included, and inclusion does not mean finality.
Walkthrough: One Wallet Action to Recorded History
You can move on when…
- You can tell the story from wallet action to recorded history without gaps.
- You can explain why “pending” is local and competitive.
- You can explain what changes when a transaction becomes included in a block.
- You can explain what confirmations measure and what risk still remains.