Transactions & Fees

A transaction is a signed instruction that says “move this amount from my address to that address.” Here’s the lifecycle, start to finish.

How a transaction moves

You create it — pick a recipient address and an amount in your wallet app.
You sign it — your wallet uses your private key to produce a cryptographic signature proving the request is really yours. The key itself is never exposed; only the signature is.
It’s broadcast — the signed transaction goes out to the network’s computers (nodes).
It’s confirmed — miners (Bitcoin) or validators (Ethereum and most others) include it in a new block. Each additional block on top is another confirmation, making it harder to ever reverse.

Two things beginners must internalize

It’s irreversible. Once confirmed, there’s no chargeback and no undo. Send to the wrong address and the funds are simply gone. This is why you verify the recipient before signing.
You sign, then it’s final. Signing is the moment of commitment. Everything before it is editable; nothing after it is.

What fees pay for

Every transaction pays a network fee to the people running the network — not to KeepKey, and not to any wallet maker. The fee is the incentive for miners/validators to include your transaction.

On Bitcoin, it’s called the miner fee and scales with the transaction’s size in bytes.
On Ethereum (and EVM chains), it’s called gas — you pay for the computation your transaction uses, priced in the network’s native coin.
Fees rise when the network is busy and fall when it’s quiet. A higher fee generally confirms faster.

You always need a little of a network’s native coin to pay its fees — e.g. ETH to move tokens on Ethereum. See Networks, Coins & Tokens.

On your KeepKey

KeepKey performs the signing inside the device. The transaction’s recipient and amount appear on the device screen, and nothing is signed until you approve with a physical button press — see Verifying Transactions.
Send your first transaction in Send & Receive.
Trading one coin for another? The built-in Swap builds the transactions for you — and you still confirm each one on the device.