Accounts

Essential to interact with the blockchain via transactions; they have an address, balance and private key.

Accounts

Contracts

Collection of code (its "functions") and data (its "state") that resides at a specific address on the blockchain.

Contracts

Blocks

A package of data that contains zero or more transactions, the hash of the previous block ("parent"), and optionally other data. Because each block (except for the initial "genesis block") points to the previous block, the data structure that they form is called a "blockchain".

Blocks Latest block Pending block Genesis block

Transactions

A digitally signed message authorizing some particular action associated with the blockchain.

View a block to see its transactions.

Distributed Ledger

A database held and updated independently by each participant (or node) in a large network. Every single node on the network processes every transaction, coming to its own conclusions and then voting on those conclusions to make certain the majority agree. Once there is this consensus, the distributed ledger has been updated, and all nodes maintain their own identical copy of the ledger.

Wallets

Stores the public and private keys which can be used to receive or spend the cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency itself is not in the wallet; instead, a private key is stored that shows ownership of a public key.