For everyone / Pickle in plain terms

When is it confirmed

Most of the time a wallet says pending and then says done. Here there are three separate moments between those two words, and they guarantee different things.

Three different moments

It ran. The network works out the result of your transaction the instant it arrives and signs a statement saying so. This happens at a scheduling target of about 10 milliseconds - fast enough that an application can show you the outcome as though it were instant. If your transaction was going to fail, you know here.

It is in a block. Those results are gathered into a standard Ethereum-shaped block at a scheduling target of about 250 milliseconds. This is what a wallet or an explorer calls confirmed, and it is the number that appears as a block height next to your transaction.

It is settled on Ethereum. Later, the record is written to Ethereum itself. Only after that does your transaction inherit Ethereum's security rather than Pickle's operator's word. This site calls that finality and uses the word for nothing else.

A scheduling target is not a promise

Those two figures are intervals the network aims for, not guarantees. If a moment is missed the network moves on to the next one rather than catching up, so treat them as a rhythm rather than as a deadline you can rely on.

When the difference matters

For most things it does not. Buying something small, trying an application, moving test funds between your own wallets - the first moment is enough, and that is precisely what the speed is for.

It starts mattering when someone else's decision depends on yours being irreversible:

Accepting a payment for something you hand over immediately. Until the record is settled on Ethereum, you are trusting Pickle's operator not to have reordered or dropped the transaction.
Moving funds off the chain. A withdrawal has to be validated against a settled result, which is why it is not instant when everything else is.
Anything large. The larger the amount, the less the earliest moment should satisfy you - the same instinct as waiting for a bank transfer to clear rather than trusting the confirmation screen.

Today, all three moments rest on one operator

In Phase 0 a single sequencer orders every transaction, and there is no mechanism on the network that forces it to behave or lets anyone else prove it misbehaved. So the distinction above is the shape of the guarantee rather than the strength of it - and on a testnet with valueless coins, that is a thing to understand rather than to worry about.

The words you will see

Interfaces are not consistent about this, and the same word means different things in different places. On this site:

Preconfirmation - the first moment. Signed, immediate, and not final.
Confirmation - the second. Your transaction has a block number.
Finality - the third, and only the third. Settled on Ethereum.

If you see "confirmed" anywhere else, it almost certainly means the second moment. Nothing in a wallet will tell you about the third.