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Ethereum: Why is it possible to have multiples addresses in an output of a transaction?

Published by Terlumun Aondover on February 11th, 2025.

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Understanding Ethereum Transaction Outputs and Address Plurality

When trying to load your Ethereum blockchain into a MySQL database, it is crucial to understand how Ethereum transactions are structured, especially when it comes to output values. In this article, we will explore why Ethereum allows multiple addresses in the output of a transaction and examine the implications for data storage.

Transaction Output

An Ethereum transaction typically has one input (also known as a “from” address) and one or more outputs (also known as “to” addresses). Each output value is associated with a unique address, which can be a private key or a public address. When you send funds from an input to multiple outputs, each output value receives a corresponding amount of Ether.

Problem: Multiple Addresses in a Single Transaction

There are cases in Ethereum where it is possible to have multiple addresses in the same transaction output. This is called “multiple addresses” or “nested addresses.” To solve this, the Ethereum protocol uses a mechanism called “address encoding,” which allows multiple addresses to be stored together.

When you create a new Ethereum account, your public address is an example of such encoding. If you have multiple accounts with different public addresses (e.g., “0x…” and “0x…”), they can both be in the same transaction output, even though they are separate inputs.

MySQL Database Considerations

Ethereum: Why is it possible to have multiples addresses in an output of a transaction?

To upload your Ethereum blockchain to a MySQL database, you will need to convert the raw transaction data from Ethereum’s JSON-LD format (the Ethereum transaction representation standard) to a more manageable format. Doing so can cause problems with storing and querying multiple addresses in a single output.

Address Plurality

MySQL table columns can only have a certain number of values; each value must be distinct from the others. However, when storing Ethereum transaction outputs with multiple addresses (e.g., “0x…”, “0x…”, and “0x…”), you are essentially creating a single column that stores three separate rows of addresses.

To get around this limitation, MySQL supports “table variables” or “temporary tables,” which allow you to store values in a single column with multiple rows. You can create a temporary table using the CREATE TABLE statement and populate it with Ethereum transaction data:


- Create a temporary table to store Ethereum output addresses
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE ethereum_outputs (
address VARCHAR(42), -- Assuming 42 characters per address
value DECIMAL(8, 5) // Store ether amounts in decimal format
);
-- Insert Ethereum transaction data into a temporary table
INSERT INTO ethereum_outputs (address, value)
SELECT 
"0x...", 
"0x...",
'0x...'
FROM your_transaction_data;
-- Query the temporary table to access multiple addresses in a single output
SELECT address, value FROMethereum_outputs WHERE address IN ('0x...', '0x...');

Please note that this method assumes that you are using MySQL version 8.0 or later, which supports CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE and the ‘IN’ clause for queries.

Conclusion

In summary, Ethereum allows multiple addresses in a single transaction output due to address encoding. To load your Ethereum blockchain into a MySQL database, you can create temporary tables with separate columns for each address in the transaction output. Using table variables or stored procedures, you can efficiently store this data and query it, avoiding the column addressing limitations.

I hope this article helped explain the concept of multiple addresses in Ethereum transaction output and provided some guidance on how to get around the MySQL address column limitations.