Transactions

Every action on Ethereum starts as a transaction: send ETH, deploy a contract, approve a token, or call a protocol function. The details vary, but the path from wallet click to final receipt follows the same high-level loop.

Two outputs matter after inclusion: the new chain state and the receipt. State is what contracts and balances become. The receipt is the proof that execution happened, with logs and gas usage for explorers, indexers, and frontends.

Reading transactions well means separating intent from result. A signed call says what the sender tried to do. The receipt tells you what the network actually accepted and how much computation it consumed along the way.