World State (Permissioned Chains)

Key value view of current ledger data maintained by permissioned frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric to speed queries compared to scanning full block history.

Write-Ahead Log, WAL

Durability technique where updates are first recorded to an append only log before applying to state; used in node databases and indexers for crash recovery.

Weierstrass Curve

Form of elliptic curves commonly used in cryptography, such as secp256k1 for Bitcoin and ECDSA; different forms trade speed and security properties.

Witness Encryption

Encryption scheme where a message can be decrypted by providing a witness to an NP statement’s truth, proposed for time lock and on chain puzzles.

Whisper (ASR Model)

Open source automatic speech recognition model known for robustness across accents and noise; often used to transcribe crypto podcasts and dev calls.

Warmup, Learning Rate Warmup

Schedule that gradually increases the learning rate at the start of training to stabilize optimization, commonly combined with cosine decay or step schedules.

Weight Decay

L2 regularization technique that penalizes large parameter values to reduce overfitting; often decoupled from momentum in modern optimizers like AdamW.

Weakly Supervised Learning

Training regime using noisy, partial, or indirect labels like heuristics and distant supervision to scale datasets when full annotation is expensive.

WordPiece Tokenization

Subword tokenization algorithm used by BERT like models to balance vocabulary size and coverage by splitting rare words into learned pieces.

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