Blockchain 101: Transaction lifecycle & the mempool

In this episode, we are joined by Tomasz Drwięga, a Core Developer at Parity Technologies, to discuss the lifecycle of a transaction on the Ethereum network and how the mempool works.

We will be covering the following topics:

• What a mempool/transaction queue/transaction pool is.
• How a transaction reaches a mempool and what the mempool does with it.
• Looking at what causes the CPU increase and delays in the network.
• What happens when a transaction gets stuck.
• Gossip.
• The security properties of the mempool.
• What a network attack could look like.

Here are some additional links and ressources if you want to dig deeper.

• https://medium.com/blockchannel/life-cycle-of-an-ethereum-transaction-e5c66bae0f6e
• https://blog.infura.io/when-there-are-too-many-pending-transactions-8ec1a88bc87e
• https://etherscan.io/txsPending
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol
• https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethereum-Wire-Protocol