Blocks

The consensus engine chronicles a sequence of blocks affirmed by a supermajority of nodes. These blocks form the blockchain, a digital ledger replicated across all nodes. Blocks, serving as an aggregate of state transitions, maintain a lineage by referencing their preceding block and encapsulating transactions.

Blocks are state transtitions. Blocks hold a reference to the previous block and contain transactions.

Transactions (txs) are state transtitions, each cryptographically signed by accounts. Txs are made up of transaction messages (TxMsgs).

TxMsgs are atomic state transitions. Within a transaction, each TxMsg is processed entirely or not at all, enuring consistency in state updates.

Block

A block consists of a header, transactions, votes (the commit), and a list of evidence of malfeasance (ie. signing conflicting votes).

Name	Type	Description	Validation
Header	Header	Header corresponding to the block. This field contains information used throughout consensus and other areas of the protocol. To find out what it contains, visit [header] (#block-header)	Must adhere to the validation rules of header
Data	Data	Data contains a list of transactions. The contents of the transactions are unknown to Tendermint.	This field can be empty or populated, but no validation is performed. Applications can perform validation on individual transactions prior to block creation using checkTx.
Evidence	EvidenceList	Evidence contains a list of infractions committed by validators.	Can be empty, but when populated the validations rules from evidenceList apply
LastCommit	Commit	LastCommit includes one vote for every validator. All votes must either be for the previous block, nil or absent. If a vote is for the previous block it must have a valid signature from the corresponding validator. The sum of the voting power of the validators that voted must be greater than 2/3 of the total voting power of the complete validator set. The number of votes in a commit is limited to 10000 (see types.MaxVotesCount).	Must be empty for the initial height and must adhere to the validation rules of commit.

BlockID

The BlockID contains two distinct Merkle roots of the block. The BlockID includes these two hashes, as well as the number of parts (ie. len(MakeParts(block)))

Name	Type	Description
Hash	slice of bytes ([]byte)	MerkleRoot of all the fields in the header (ie. MerkleRoot(header))
PartSetHeader	PartSetHeader	Used for secure gossiping of the block during consensus, is the MerkleRoot of the complete serialized block cut into parts (ie. MerkleRoot(MakeParts(block)))

See MerkleRoot for details.

Block Commit

Commit is a simple wrapper for a list of signatures, with one for each validator. It also contains the relevant BlockID, height and round:

Name	Type	Description	Validation
Height	int64	Height at which this commit was created.	Must be > 0
Round	int32	Round that the commit corresponds to.	Must be > 0
BlockID	BlockID	The blockID of the corresponding block.	Must adhere to the validation rules of BlockID.
Signatures	Array of CommitSig	Array of commit signatures that correspond to current validator set.	Length of signatures must be > 0 and adhere to the validation of each individual Commitsig

Consensus Vote

A vote is a signed message from a validator for a particular block. The vote includes information about the validator signing it. When stored in the blockchain or propagated over the network, votes are encoded in Protobuf.

Name	Description
Type	The type of message the vote refers to. Must be PrevoteType or PrecommitType
Height	Height for which this vote was created for
Round	Round that the commit corresponds to.
BlockID	The blockID of the corresponding block.
Timestamp	Timestamp represents the time at which a validator signed.
ValidatorAddress	Address of the validator
ValidatorIndex	Index at a specific block height corresponding to the Index of the validator in the set.
Signature	Signature by the validator if they participated in consensus for the associated block.
Extension	Vote extension provided by the Application running at the validator's node.
ExtensionSignature	Signature for the extension