All public blockchains make use of blockchain approvals. These are important as they can help you understand how confident you can be when making a transaction. Any transaction starts with zero confirmation when first posted to the blockchain. This number then increases when information is added to the first block, confirmed, given a permanent location, and followed by more blocks.
Blockchain approvals are vital as they are a way of verifying and legitimizing information that will then become immutable. If a transaction is considered fraudulent, it is rejected from the blockchain: zero blockchain approvals mean zero transaction.
On average, cryptocurrency exchanges require at least three approvals until a transaction is accepted. Coinbase, for example, does not ultimately accept a bitcoin transaction until it receives at least three approvals.
However, the larger the transaction, the more blockchain approval is required. This is because there is more approval, the more difficult the process is to reverse. For a $1 million transaction, it is not uncommon to expect at least 60 approvals. The amount of blockchain approvals required to validate a transaction varies with blockchain. Let’s take a look at Bitcoin and Ethereum in this article.
What is Bitcoin Mempool?
Bitcoin Mempool is a sea of unverified Bitcoin transactions on the Bitcoin network. As described above, once a transaction is uploaded to the blockchain, it is not immediately confirmed, but released to the Memphis of transactions accepted in the move.
All nodes in the Bitcoin network are connected to Memphis, and this includes miners who collate transactions from Memphis into a block. The miner who first solved the mathematical equation and added The Block to the blockchain is the first to approve the block. Therefore, the first 12.5 BTC miner to receive the award.
This is fairly simple, but some transactions gather faster than others from Memphis. Why? That’s because miners also earn a bonus percentage of transaction fees (called Bitcoin mining fees).
Miners will choose transactions with higher fees first to earn a higher bonus. It also explains why transaction fees are stuck for your payment process. In fact, as more people join the Bitcoin network, this bottleneck is one of the Bitcoin community’s biggest challenges.
How to Speed up Blockchain Approval Times
The higher the fee you pay, the more likely it is that your transaction will be confirmed on time (there is a 10 per cent chance it will take 60 minutes or less). However, if your operation remains unverified, the recommended wait time is 72 hours before resubmitting.
But if you want to avoid paying fees, you can check to see how many unverified transactions there are at a given moment and calculate how long it will take.
Ethereum Blockchain Approvals
When it comes to Ethereum blockchain approvals, the agreed number seems undecided. According to the Ethereum White Paper, 7 approvals should be sufficient (about 2 minutes) to approve the process.
However, Ethereum miners should check the parameters of the last 250 block. So, if you want to be careful like the miners, you should expect 250 approvals. This sounds like a lot, but in practice it’s only about an hour.
Coinbase requires 50 ethereum approvals before it considers a transaction has been completed. It should also be noted that the Ethereum blockchain also faces significant scalability issues. Ethereum is trying to scale back quickly to get more users and, thanks to proof of evidence, approvals should be even faster.
Etherscan and Ether Gas
Ethereum does not have a Memphis for pending operations; it is simply called process pooling. The pool contains all submitted transactions that have not yet been assigned to a block.
There are multiple methods to speed up your transaction and decide the best gas price when submitting your Ethereum transaction. To see an overview of gas use, you can try the ETH Gas Station and see how many transactions are on hold using Etherscan.
Etherscan is especially popular as you can order transactions based on the gas price (just click on the gasprice column). You’ll then see more or less the same list the miners have seen, and if you choose a gas price within the first few pages, you should enjoy short approval periods.
The Takeaway
Blockchain approvals are required to secure your transactions. The best way to secure a faster approval is to pay a higher fee. As all blockades begin to scale to prepare for more users, it will be interesting to see how this affects the prices we pay and the times we wait.
