This article is the first in a series of articles discussing how Stox is working with the Ethereum blockchain.

This article is pretty technical and assumes you have knowledge in basic blockchain (transactions, nonce, gas) and software architecture (queues, services, database) terms.

Stox is a semi-decentralized Ethereum blockchain application. Meaning part of application operates directly on the Ethereum network with smart contracts, but a lot of the time it needs to interact with the blockchain from the outside, and that includes sending transactions to the Ethereum network. As transactions sent to the blockchain may take several minutes or even several hours (depending on network congestion), we needed to develop an infrastructure for automatically sending and tracking transactions on the blockchain.

To achieve that we designed a system that receives any kind of request on one end, construct a blockchain transaction, and outputs its result on the other end.