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An account is an object in the state; in a currency system, this is a record of how much money some particular user has; in more complex systems accounts can have different functions
An address is used to identify private key holders when transferring value.
An archive node stores everything kept in the full node but also builds an archive of historical states. They are necessary if you want to check the state of an account at any given block height.
The ATOM token is the native staking currency of the Cosmos Hub. Validators use the ATOM tokens to stake and secure the zones within Cosmos.
AVAX is the Avalanche network’s native asset. It has two special uses on the Avalanche network:
- Validators must stake AVAX
- Transaction fees will be paid in AVAX
A block is a collection of several Operations. The operations are located in the payload of the block which is specific to the protocol.
Along with the payload, the block includes a header which contains protocol-agnostic data. It consists of generic information such as the block predecessor’s hash and the block’s timestamp.
A blockchain is an append-only ledger. Blockchains have the special property that nobody can re-write old sections of the ledger. Applications, such as payments systems, can be built atop blockchains.
A form of consensus algorithm in which up to a third of participants can be faulty or malicious.
The ticker symbol for the Celo native asset, often written in capital letters to avoid confusion with references to the Celo protocol.
A consensus protocol is an algorithm, or series of steps, that a set of computers follow in order to reach agreement on some piece of information. In a payments system, for example, the computers follow a protocol to agree on who has how much money.
Short for Decentralized Application. An application, usually a mobile application, which to deliver its functionality connects to a decentralized network, rather than to centralized services in a single organization's data centers.
Decentralized Finance; open source software and networks without intermediaries in the financial space.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine. A runtime environment used by smart contracts on some Web 3 protocols including Ethereum.
A situation where two blocks are generated pointing to the same block as their parent, and some portion of miners see one block first and some see the other. This may lead to two blockchains growing at the same time. Generally, it is mathematically near-certain that a fork will resolve itself within four blocks as miners on one chain will eventually get lucky and that chain will grow longer and all miners switch to it; however, forks may last longer if miners disagree on whether or not a particular block is valid.
A computer running the blockchain software that maintains a full copy of the blockchain locally.
Blockchain governance is a process that allows participants to vote on-chain using their staked tokens.
The past transactions and blocks. Note that the state is a deterministic function of the history.
A client that downloads only a small part of the blockchain, allowing users of low-power or low-storage hardware like smartphones and laptops to maintain almost the same guarantee of security by sometimes selectively downloading small parts of the state without needing to spend megabytes of bandwidth and gigabytes of storage on full blockchain validation and maintenance.
Luna is the native staking token recognized by the Terra protocol. Through its role in collateralizing the mechanisms that secure the price-stability of Terra stablecoins and modulate the incentives of validators, Luna serves as a foundational asset for the entire Terra network and ecosystem.
A node is a computer participating in the network's consensus.
An interaction that takes place solely through a transaction being executed on the blockchain and updating the state of the ledger.
For smart contracts, oracles are a middle-ware product in which data outside of the blockchain (such as real world data from weather to stocks) is connected to it. That data is then used for conditions of smart contracts.
Poof-of-Stake is a method of consensus which uses the token itself to secure the network, which acts as a sort of virtualized ASIC, instead of using physical hardware to burn through electricity in order to do so.
Software Development Kit. Generally, a suite of developer tools that enable applications to be built on a platform.
A smart contract is a contract whose terms are expressed as a computer program with logic and state persisted on the blockchain. Smart contracts can automatically carry out its terms and conditions with total transparency and no counter-party risk.
A smart digital asset is a digital representation of a real-world thing such as an equity, bond, money etc. They can have a complex ruleset that defines their behavior and how they are handled. This ruleset can include things like, “can’t be traded until next year,” for example.
The set of data that a blockchain network strictly needs to keep track of, and that represents data currently relevant to applications on the chain.
In a currency, this is simply balances; in more complex applications this could refer to other data structures that the application in question needs to keep track of (eg. who has what domain name, what is the status of a given contract, etc).
A transaction queries or modifies the state of a blockchain.
A validator is a node participating in the consensus protocol. Validators work together to achieve consensus as to which transactions have taken place on a blockchain.
A Virtual Machine defines the application-level logic of a blockchain. In technical terms, it defines a state machine. It specifies the state that is held, the state transition function, and the transactions that clients can issue in order to query/modify the state. Developers create Virtual Machines that implements some functionality and then create a blockchain that runs the Virtual Machine. Every blockchain runs (is an instance of) a Virtual Machine.
An app that allows a user to manage an account, and usually stores the associated private key.
XTZ, tez, or ꜩ is the native currency of Tezos. XTZ is programmable money created by smart contract on the Tezos blockchain. ****It is used to pay on-chain fees and influence the network's governance.