What are operations on Tezos?

Subsets of operations on Tezos are commonly known as Transactions, they usually refer to transfers of tokens or smart contracts calls.

Some examples of operations which are not transactions on Tezos:

• Originations
• Endorsements
• Proposals
• Ballot

Implicit accounts and originated accounts

Let's start by talking about the two types of addresses in Tezos:

Implicit account

• An implicit account is linked to a manager (see General definition of a tezos smart contract), which owns the public key. The hash of the public key outputs an address.
• Depending on the chosen Digital Signature Algorithm's elliptic curve (see ECDSA), the latter starts with "tz1" (Ed25519 curve), "tz2" (Secp256k1 curve), or "tz3" (P256 curve).
• In the first transfer operation to the account's address, a fixed cost is set aside to create the storage for the account.
• Only implicit accounts can be registered as delegates and participate in the baking process.

Originated accounts

• Smart contracts are also called "originated accounts" and are created with an origination operation (see Smart Contracts).
• They don't have a private key and public key pair. Originated accounts' addresses start with KT1. They run their Michelson code each time they receive a transaction.

Tezos operations

An operation is usually a message sent from one address to another.