What state is a transaction in after being succesfully posted?

Question

Related to how to trace the state of a transaction after submit?

After a transaction has been sent to the Post Transaction endpoint and it returns a successful response:

A successful response (i.e. any response with a successful HTTP response code) indicates that the transaction was successful and has been included into the ledger.

Does that mean it is has completed all the lifecycle steps? And as such there is no need to track it a way or an another.

Note: I'm wondering this comparing to the Etherum blockchain where there is a two step process: submit the transaction, wait for it to propagate.

So the question here asked differently is: does Horizon wait for the whole lifecycle to complete before returning ?

Answer 1

Yes, Horizon waits for the transaction to be included into the ledger. SCP protocol implies immediate finality after the confirmation, so your transaction is 100% confirmed and included into the ledger once you receive the confirmation from Horizon. If it fails, Horizon returns specific error code. You don't need to track your transaction after submission or wait for any other confirmations.

Usually the whole process takes up to 5 seconds, but sometimes it may be longer due transactions congestion and surge pricing.