Let's now move to the transaction types in the business network:

Transactions
 InitialApplication, Approve, Reject, SuggestChanges, ShipProduct, ReceiveProduct, ReadyForPayment, Close, CreateDemoParticipants

At last, we can see quite a few types! This is typical–while the numbers of the types of participants and assets is quite limited, assets have rich life cycles. If you think about our application, the letter of credit goes through many states, as it interacts with the different participants in the network. These transactions correspond directly to those interactions. (Ignore CreateDemoParticipants, this is a transaction that sets up the demo!)

The transaction names are fairly straightforward to understand–these are closely related to the letter's life cycle. They are the steps you went through using the application, as different participants. Alice made the InitialApplication, and had the option to SuggestChanges to the terms and conditions of the letter. Mattias and Ella could Approve or Reject the letter. Bob invoked ShipProduct to indicate that he had performed his end of the bargain, and Alice used ReceiveProduct to likewise indicate she had received the computers. Finally, Matias indicated that the letter was ReadyForPayment, and Ella issued the Close transaction to end the process and trigger payment to Bob.

There's no reason why the number of transaction types has to be larger than the number of types of assets. One could easily imagine many different asset types that had the same, relatively simple, life cycle. Imagine a retailer's product inventory for example–goods could be sourced, delivered, sold, and returned. This is a relatively simple life cycle, but the number of different types of goods could be quite large. However, we might expect these different goods all to share this life cycle through some commonality of behavior; after all, they are all products. There will be more on this idea of inheritance later.

We'll look at the implementation of these transactions in more detail, but for now, it's most important to understand the conceptual picture of asset flow between the participants in the network, as described by transactions, rather than worrying about the exact logic behind these transactional changes.