A receipt places surviving log records in transaction context.
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A case file groups several records under the same completed procedure.
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From an emitted Transfer event to a receipt logStep 1 / 4
A token implementation may update balances and emit its standard Transfer event. State and the emitted record are related but distinct.
A token implementation may update balances and emit its standard Transfer event. State and the emitted record are related but distinct.A non-anonymous Transfer event uses the full thirty-two-byte Keccak-256 signature digest as topic zero, not a four-byte function selector.In the common ERC-20 shape, from and to occupy topics one and two. The raw value is a thirty-two-byte data word. Other standards can index fields differently.An application can decode receipt logs under the correct ABI. A matching signature does not establish that an unknown emitter is an honest token.
Animated local teaching model. No wallet, RPC or live blockchain data. Some labels and hashes are abbreviated for readability.
Separate receipt from transaction input
Transaction input requests an action, while receipt logs describe emitted records that survived execution. Reading calldata does not automatically reveal every log produced.
Inspect each emitter
One transaction can call several contracts, producing logs with different emitting addresses. Do not assign every log to the transaction’s direct destination.
Keep order and block context
Receipt logs have an execution order and appear in block context. A reorganization can change which transaction inclusion remains part of the accepted chain.
Distinguish logs from normal return values
Ordinary transactionreceipts do not provide all function return values or complete internal traces. Logs are only the records that code explicitly emitted and retained.
Inspect the example
event Transfer(address indexed from, address indexed to, uint256 value)
topic 0: 0xddf252ad1be2c89b69c2b068fc378daa952ba7f163c4a11628f55a4df523b3ef
topic 1: 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
topic 2: 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002
data: 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000064
Toy emitter; from address 1; to address 2; raw amount 100.
No token decimals or verified token identity are implied.
This single log sketch would be one item within a larger receipt.