A cryptocurrency transaction is a transfer of information made between blockchain addresses. These transfers have to be signed with a private key that corresponds to its address.

Although it would be possible to handle coins individually, it would be unwieldy to make a separate transaction for every cent in a transfer.

To allow value to be split and combined, transactions contain multiple inputs and outputs. Normally there will be either a single input from a larger previous transaction or multiple inputs combining smaller amounts, and at most two outputs: one for the payment, and one returning the change, if any, back to the sender.

Example of a Cryptocurrency Transaction

What are UTXOs?