How DigiByte Blocks Work

Every 15 seconds or so, DigiByte's network produces a new block — a bundle of transactions cryptographically chained to the block before it. Understanding how that bundle forms, spreads, and eventually becomes irreversible is the foundation for everything else in DigiByte's design.

The mempool: where transactions wait

When you broadcast a DigiByte transaction, it doesn't go straight into a block. It first lands in the mempool (memory pool) — a waiting area every full node keeps of transactions it has seen but that haven't been mined yet. Miners scanning the mempool generally prioritize transactions paying a higher fee rate, since block space is limited. A transaction sitting with too low a fee for current conditions can wait in the mempool until fees drop or it eventually expires.

Building and mining a block

A miner assembles a candidate block by picking transactions out of the mempool, arranging them, and repeatedly hashing the block header while varying a value called the nonce, searching for a hash below the network's current difficulty target. Whichever miner — on whichever of DigiByte's five algorithms — finds a valid hash first gets to add their block to the chain and collect the block reward.

The block header itself is compact: it doesn't contain the full text of every transaction, just a reference to the previous block's hash (chaining it into the blockchain), a Merkle root summarizing every transaction in the block, a timestamp, the difficulty target, and the winning nonce. That Merkle root is powerful — it lets anyone prove a specific transaction is included in a block without downloading every transaction in it.

Propagation and orphans

Once a block is found, the miner's node relays it to its peers. Each peer independently validates the block — checking every transaction, the proof-of-work, and the header — before relaying it onward to its own peers. This gossip-style propagation is how a new block reaches the entire network within seconds, and it's also DigiByte's real defense: a node never has to trust a block just because a miner produced it, it verifies it.

Occasionally two miners solve a block at nearly the same height within moments of each other. Both blocks are valid on their own, but only one can ultimately extend the longest chain; the other becomes a stale (orphan) block and is abandoned once the network converges. Its transactions simply return to the mempool to be mined into a later block, unless they were also included in the winning block.

Confirmations and finality

A transaction's first confirmation happens the moment it's included in a block. Each subsequent block mined on top adds another confirmation, making a reorganization that would undo it exponentially less likely. Because DigiByte blocks arrive roughly every 15 seconds, six confirmations — a common threshold for treating a payment as settled — take about 90 seconds, compared to roughly an hour on a chain with 10-minute blocks. That speed is a direct, measurable consequence of the block interval, not a marketing claim.

Every block also matters to DigiDollar: DigiByte's node-native stablecoin recomputes the DGB collateral behind every outstanding DUSD on every single block, roughly every 15 seconds, which is exactly why DigiDollar's live figures on the DigiDollar page can carry a fresh as-of timestamp instead of a stale, trust-me number.

See real blocks

You don't have to take any of this on faith. The block explorer lets you open any recent DigiByte block and inspect its header, its full transaction list, and its confirmations in real time. Once you understand the mempool-to-block pipeline, the next natural question is what keeps any single miner from dominating that process — covered in DigiByte's five mining algorithms.