🎁 Exclusive offer: Get EXTRA Bits and Celebrate Bybit's 6th Birthday With $2.2M Prize Pool. Act now!
Crypto Terms:  Letter C
Jul 07, 2023 |
updated: Apr 02, 2024

What is Confirmation?

Confirmation Meaning:
Confirmation - When a cryptocurrency transaction is included in a block on the blockchain, it is regarded as confirmed.
medium
2 minutes

Let's find out Confirmation meaning, definition in crypto, what is Confirmation, and all other detailed facts.

Confirmation is a feature that certifies or proves the truth of something. For example, confirming that your order has arrived. Besides, this is the last proof.

Looking from the perspective of cryptocurrencies, confirmation is defined as the number of blocks that have gone through after the transaction was uploaded to a coin's blockchain. The security is determined by the number of confirmations.

An unconfirmed transaction is the one that is waiting to be added to the blockchain by miners. Following the initial block, each subsequent block is added, leading to one confirmation. This implies that if one confirmation takes ten minutes, six confirmations might take an hour, and so forth.

They are gathered in the mempool, which is a backlog of all presently unconfirmed transactions.

Speaking about smaller confirmations, these take place after the buyer and seller agree to wait for zero transactions. Larger transactions wait for more blocks.

When an unconfirmed transaction makes it into a newly mined block, it obtains a confirmation. Following that, each new block uploaded to the chain serves as an extra confirmation for the transaction. Thus, if a transaction was verified in block 348202 and the current block height is 348207, it has six confirmations.

Each exchange and retailer must determine the number of confirmations required for each currency. The number of confirmations that have to be 100% secure grows with time.

The amount of confirmations is significant for security purposes. If a hacker wishes to target the blockchain by feeding it fake transaction information, they must breach the security of each individual block in exact sequence. Beginning with the most recent one in the chain.

The more blocks mined since a certain transaction occurred, the more difficult it is for a hacker to break through all of them and reverse that transaction.

For example, with Bitcoin, a new block is added every 10 minutes. Therefore, there will be one confirmation every 10 minutes. Meaning that it will begin after an unconfirmed transaction is added.

Most crypto companies that handle customer transactions, such as wallets and exchanges, need a minimum of three confirmations before acknowledging a transaction as genuinely legitimate and permanent.