How To Send Ethereum Transactions
You can send transactions between any two accounts on Ethereum. Typically, these transactions occur in the production environment called the Mainnet but there’s also a few test networks available for us to use. Test networks are useful when you want to use Ethereum without having to pay real money. Some of the popular test nets today are Ropsten, Rinkeby and Kovan. Properly functioning test environments are a critical part of the DAPP development process. Ropsten, which is the main public network and uses proof of work has become prone to spammy transactions and slowness. In response to this, two separate community efforts led to the creation of new test nets, Rinkeby and Kovan. These networks require authenticating using your GitHub account and the transactions are validated using proof of authority meaning there are a small set of validators.
Let’s try to send a transaction over the Rinkeby test net. We’ll use a Chrome plugin called MetaMask to connect to the network and make transactions. I highly recommend getting MetaMask since it makes interacting with the Ethereum blockchain extremely easy. First, we’ll change the network to Rinkeby to make sure we’re using test ether and not real ether. Let’s create two test accounts and label them. To get test ether into these accounts, we need to use a tool called a Faucet which is just a website where you enter your address and it sends you some test ether. Let’s copy the address for one of our accounts. When we click the buy button, we get redirected to the Faucet. Since we’re connected to Rinkeby, we need to use our GitHub credentials to get the test ether. To do this, go to gist.github.com, create a new Gist with a single line that contains the address you just copied and publish it. You then copy the Gist URL and paste it into the Faucet. In a few short moments, we can see that we have updated the balance in our account.
The reason the balance took a few seconds to update is because we need to wait for the transaction to get mined on the Rinkeby network. Now, let’s move this test ether between our accounts. First, let’s copy the address of our receiving account. Then, we click the send button, paste the address, as well as the amount and hit submit. Once we submit the transaction, we’re provided a transaction hash which we can use to reference this transaction.
If we use an Ethereum blockchain explorer like Etherscan, we can get more details about this transaction. Since we made the transaction on the Rinkeby network, we have to use rinkeby.etherscan.io and we can see that the transaction is still waiting to be mined. Once it is successfully mined, we’ll see a block number assigned to the transaction. We can then verify the updated account balances using MetaMask. To learn more about Ethereum, check out our online guides and courses at blockgeeks.com. Thanks for watching and see you next time.
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