Last Updated on 3. May 2023 by Martin Schuster

Since Ethereum is a blockchain, it contains blocks. Blocks contain the transactions, and due to their strict order, they represent the transaction history. Transactions in a block are ordered too.

The Block

An Ethereum block contains the following data: [Source: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/blocks/]

Timestamp:  The time when the block was mined in seconds from unix epoch.

Block number:  The length of the blockchain in blocks when the block was created.

Difficulty:  The hashing or staking effort required to mine the block given in a hexadecimal number.

Nonce: A value that needs to be found in combined with the mixHash, to prove that the block was mined through proof of work.

mixHash: A unique identifier for that block.

Parent hash: The hash of the block that came before the current block.

Transactions root:  The hash of all transactions included in this block. A Merkle tree is used to calculate the hash.

State root: The hash of all account balances, contract storage, contract code, and account nonces. The hash is calculated using a Merkle/Patricia tree. The hash function is keccak256.

Receipt hash: The hash of the recipient information.

Transactions

Transactions contain several informations like:

Nonce: unique number of a transaction per account.

gasPrice: Amount of ETH paid for one unit of gas.

gasLimit: Max amount of gas a user is willing to spend in this transaction.

to: Recipient

value: Amount of ETH sent in this transaction to the recipient.

signature: v, r, s

init (optional): Used when a contract is created

data (optional): input data of the message call.

The State

In contrast to Bitcoin, Ethereum maintains a state. You can imagine the state as a large sheet of paper, where all balances, variables, and smart contracts are stored. A transaction changes the state.

We can express this as a formula:

Y(S, T)= S’

S is the old state

T is a transaction S’ is the new state

This is a major difference to bitcoin, where the “state” consists of unspent transaction outputs.

The state itself is a huge data structure that is called a modified Merkle-Patricia-Trie.

On the top of the Merkle-Patricia Trie, we have the root. And this root is part of the block that is confirmed by the miners.