What type of validation happens in transaction propagation?

Question

I am reading the Mastering Ethereum book and came across this piece:

On average, each Ethereum node maintains connections to at least 13 other nodes, called its neighbors. Each neighbor node validates the transaction as soon as they receive it. If they agree that it is valid, they store a copy and propagate it to all their neighbors (except the one it came from)

What sort of validation is going on here? I assume this is not the POW validation and this is the validation that checks the digital signature? Am I correct? or is there more to it?

Also it says a copy of the transaction is being stored. Again I assume this is some internal storage and not the actual storage on the blockchain. The question then is, why is the transaction being stored on the node? Especially given the fact that the transaction might not end up making it into the blockchain?

Last question...how does this propagation of transactions make it to the miners, who then put it to the blockchain, and how does the updated blockchain get propagated back to every node?

Answer 1

A typical kind of validation P2P layer can do is

• Ignore transactions with an invalid signature

• Ignore transactions with a ridiculous gas fee structure

These kinds of transactions do not end up in the node mempool, but nodes tend to silently drop them. For the actual behaviour, you need to read the source code of a particular node software.

A ready, mined, blocks travel P2P similarly as the transactions.