The next web, explained in plain English
J
JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight data interchange format used everywhere in web and blockchain APIs, human readable yet easy for machines to parse.
Data format where each line is a valid JSON object, convenient for streaming logs, training datasets, and batched API requests.
Lightweight remote procedure call protocol encoded in JSON, standard interface for Ethereum and many chains, used by wallets and dapps to query nodes and send transactions.
Standard and chain specific error numbers returned by node endpoints, useful for debugging issues like invalid nonces, insufficient funds, or method not found.
Specification for describing the shape and validation rules of JSON documents; used for NFT metadata, oracle payloads, and API contracts.
Twisted Edwards elliptic curve designed for efficient zk SNARK friendly operations, used in Zcash’s Sapling and related privacy protocols.
Smallest unit of Chainlink’s LINK token used in contracts and billing, analogous to wei for ETH, where 1 LINK equals 10^18 juels.
Interactive document format that mixes code, text, and outputs, popular for data exploration, model prototyping, and reproducible research.
Penalty transaction that claims funds when a channel partner broadcasts an old state; requires timely watchtower or client monitoring to react within the challenge window.
Standard for encrypting JSON tokens so only intended recipients can read the payload; used for private credentials and secure transport to wallets or relays.
JSON data structure that represents a cryptographic key with parameters like kty, kid, and alg; used to publish and rotate keys for JWT verification.
Standard for signing arbitrary payloads with JSON tokens producing a compact serialization; ensures integrity and authenticity of API calls and claims.
Compact token format with claims signed or encrypted using JWS or JWE; used for authenticating to node APIs, relays, and wallets without sharing passwords.
K
Privacy metric ensuring each record is indistinguishable from at least k‑1 others.
Metric for viral growth in product loops; sometimes applied to protocol network effects.
Unsupervised algorithm that partitions data into k clusters by minimizing within‑cluster variance.
Non‑parametric method that classifies or regresses based on the majority of nearest samples.
Distributed hash table used in P2P networks for efficient node and content discovery.
Distributed log used by indexers and analytics stacks to process on‑chain events at scale.
Function like PBKDF2, scrypt, or Argon2 used to derive keys from passwords or seeds securely.
Hash function used by Ethereum for addresses and ABI encoding; close to SHA‑3 but not identical.
Automation agent that performs on‑chain tasks like liquidations, rebalances, or upkeep jobs.
Technique that implicitly maps data into higher dimensions for linear separation via kernel functions.
Cryptographic public and private keys used for signing and address derivation.
Practice of replacing cryptographic keys periodically to limit blast radius of compromise.
Wallet that uses multi‑party computation to split signing across devices, avoiding a single private key.
Encrypted JSON format that stores a private key using a KDF and cipher; often called V3 keystore.
Hardware or cloud service for generating, storing, and using keys with strong access controls.
Corpus of documents indexed by embeddings to ground LLM responses via retrieval‑augmented generation.
Date after which a model’s training data does not include events, requiring tools or browsing.
Technique where a smaller student model learns from a larger teacher’s soft targets or explanations.
Graph of entities and relations used for search, reasoning, and RAG pipelines.
Experimental network for Polkadot used to test features and parachains with real value.
Database that stores values indexed by keys; common in node state and indexers.
Regulatory process for verifying user identity in exchanges, on‑ramps, and compliant dApps.
Monitoring transactions for risk signals like sanctions exposure, mixers, or stolen funds.
Collaborative trusted setup that generates structured reference strings for KZG commitments.
Binding, hiding commitment to a polynomial used to verify evaluations succinctly.
Proof that verifies multiple polynomial evaluations simultaneously, reducing overhead.
Proof that a committed polynomial evaluates to a claimed value at a point without revealing coefficients.
Commitment scheme (Kate‑Zaverucha‑Goldberg) enabling succinct proofs of polynomial evaluations; used for data availability and blobs.
L
Information about targets leaks into features or prompt context, inflating metrics.
Regularization that replaces hard labels with softened targets to reduce overconfidence.
Polynomial reconstruction from points; used in secret sharing and zk proofs.
One‑time signature scheme using hash functions; basis for post‑quantum XMSS and SPHINCS.
Time between a request and its response; critical for UX in wallets, L2s, and inference.
Compressed representation where generative models operate to encode semantic structure.
Post‑quantum cryptography based on lattice problems such as LWE and SIS.
Base blockchain that provides security and consensus, examples include Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Acki Nacki.
Base blockchain that handles consensus and data availability directly on its main chain.
Scaling networks built on top of a Layer 1, batching or compressing transactions and posting proofs back to L1.
Scaling system that executes off‑chain or rollup transactions while inheriting L1 security.
App‑specific or ecosystem rollups built atop L2s for specialized performance or privacy.
Normalization technique applied across features for each token; stabilizes training in transformers.
Minting deferred until purchase; creator signs a voucher, buyer pays gas at claim.
Scalar step size for gradient updates; too high diverges, too low slows training.
Policy to vary learning rate over time, e.g., cosine decay with warmup.
Smart‑contract system for collateralized borrowing and interest‑bearing deposits.
Client that verifies headers and proofs without storing full chain state; ideal for wallets and bridges.
Layer for Bitcoin enabling fast payments via payment channels and HTLCs.
Order to buy or sell at a specified price or better; implemented in DEXes via RFQs or AMM overlays.
Test that fits a linear classifier on frozen embeddings to measure learned representations.
Forced sale of collateral when a loan’s health factor falls below thresholds.
Pool that gradually shifts weights to discover price while limiting whale dominance.
Distribution of tokens to LPs to incentivize providing liquidity.
Smart‑contract pool of tokens enabling automated market making and swaps.
Property that a system continues to make progress, e.g., blocks keep finalizing.
Transformer‑based model trained on large corpora to predict tokens; used for chat, code, and agents.
Bloom filter in block headers summarizing events and addresses for fast log queries.
Adjustment to token logits at inference time to steer generation or block outputs.
Per‑token log‑probabilities emitted by models; useful for calibration and safety filters.
Directional positions in perpetuals or spot; long benefits from price increase, short from decrease.
Parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning that injects low‑rank matrices into pretrained weights.
Objective minimized during training, e.g., cross‑entropy for classification or language modeling.
Token representing a share of a liquidity pool; accrues fees and can be staked.
Write‑optimized storage structure used by RocksDB, LevelDB; common in node databases.
Recurrent neural network architecture with gates for learning long‑range dependencies.
M
The live production network where real value transfers occur, as opposed to testnets.
Pretraining objective where tokens are masked and predicted; used in BERT‑style models.
Core linear algebra operation dominating transformer compute; optimized with tiling and tensor cores.
Planning algorithm that balances exploration/exploitation by sampling trajectories; used in agents.
Attention kernels that reduce memory/time complexity using tiling, FlashAttention, or linearized variants.
Set of pending transactions waiting to be included in a block; target of MEV strategies.
Set of sibling hashes proving an element belongs to a Merkle tree with a known root.
Root hash of a Merkle tree; commits to all underlying data in a block or distribution list.
A hash-based data structure that enables efficient verification of large data sets with compact proofs.
Pattern where a relayer submits a user‑signed message, allowing gasless UX.
JSON describing an NFT’s name, image, and attributes; stored on IPFS or on‑chain.
Value extracted by reordering, including, or censoring transactions during block production.
Techniques like private mempools, transaction bundles, and orderflow auctions to reduce harmful MEV.
Service that brokers blocks between builders and proposers in PBS architectures.
Authentication using more than one factor, e.g., device + passkey; common in custodial flows.
Software that sits between on‑chain data and applications, e.g., oracles, indexers, relayers.
Original term for MEV in PoW systems; replaced by Maximal Extractable Value after PoS.
To create new tokens or NFTs according to a contract’s rules.
Training with lower precision formats to save memory and increase throughput, with loss‑scaling.
Architecture where a router activates subsets of expert MLPs per token, increasing capacity efficiently.
Multi‑layer perceptron used inside transformer blocks for token‑wise transformations.
Append‑only variant of Merkle trees optimized for proofs over growing logs.
List of words (BIP39) encoding a wallet seed; must be backed up securely.
Light client that validates blocks on consumer devices and earns a share of network rewards for verification.
Reward portion distributed to Mobile Verifiers for performing verification work.
Training and controls to ensure models follow human intent and avoid harmful behavior.
Document describing model intended use, data, metrics, risks, and limitations.
Reducing numerical precision (e.g., FP16→INT8/4) to shrink models and speed inference.
Architecture that splits execution, consensus, and data availability across specialized layers.
Technique that accumulates velocity of gradients to smooth updates; basis for SGD with momentum, Adam.
Design where execution, consensus, and data availability live on one chain.
Cryptographic technique enabling parties to jointly compute a function without revealing inputs.
Trie structure used by Ethereum to store accounts and contract state with Merkle proofs.
Operating across multiple blockchains, often with bridges and messaging protocols.
Contract utility that aggregates multiple read calls into one to save RPC round trips.
Account or contract requiring multiple signatures to authorize transactions.
N
Native staking and value‑accrual coin. Grants a pro‑rata claim on SHELL revenues via the Accumulator; supply decreases over time.
Supply schedule for NACKL designed to decrease issuance over time while revenues accumulate in the Accumulator.
Computed as Accumulator contents divided by NACKL supply. Increases as revenues accrue and supply decreases.
Probabilistic consensus used in Proof of Work networks where the longest valid chain wins based on accumulated work.
On‑chain registry that maps human‑readable names to addresses and metadata, improving UX.
Task of labeling spans in text as people, organizations, places, or other entity types.
Game‑theory state where no participant benefits by changing strategy alone, key for mechanism design.
The primary asset of a chain, used for fees, staking, security, and governance on that network.
Indexing and retrieval to find closest vectors in embedding space, used in RAG and similarity search.
Training trick that samples incorrect targets to approximate softmax or learn contrasts efficiently.
Neural representation that models 3D scenes from 2D images for novel view synthesis.
The value of a protocol increases as more users, developers, and liquidity join and interact.
Principle that SHELL pricing should reflect real costs for Block Keepers, including electricity, bandwidth, and hardware amortization.
Parameterized function composed of layers and non‑linearities trained by gradient descent.
Unique token that represents ownership of a distinct asset, often linked to media, game items, or identity.
Token standard for unique digital items, often representing art, in‑game assets, tickets, or identity primitives.
Non‑interactive proofs of proof‑of‑work that let lightweight clients verify chain work succinctly.
Zero‑knowledge proof where interaction between prover and verifier is removed using a common reference string.
A participant in a peer‑to‑peer network that validates, relays, or produces blocks.
A person or service that runs and maintains blockchain nodes for staking, validation, or indexing.
Wallet where the user controls private keys directly without a third party; keys never leave the device.
Behavior that can vary run‑to‑run, avoided in smart contracts to keep consensus deterministic.
A proof that a key or value is not present in a set or Merkle structure.
A number used once in mining or per‑account sequence to make transactions unique and ordered.
Repeating a nonce with the same key leaks secrets in signatures like ECDSA, enabling key recovery.
Techniques like batch norm or layer norm that stabilize and speed up training.
Non‑relational databases such as key‑value stores used by nodes and indexers for performance.
Unique value derived in privacy protocols to prevent double spending while preserving anonymity.
O
The loss to minimize or reward to maximize during training or optimization.
Primitive where a sender transfers one of many pieces of information, but remains oblivious to which one was received.
Design where data used by a rollup or app is stored off chain with proofs or fallback mechanisms.
Computation or storage done outside the blockchain, later proven or settled on chain.
Community or tokenholder signaling off chain, later enacted on chain by multisigs or timelocks.
Ethereum term replacing uncle block, a valid block not in the canonical chain but referenced for rewards.
Data and logic executed and stored on a blockchain with consensus guarantees.
Voting and parameter changes executed by contracts on chain, binding by code.
Structured representation of concepts and relations used in knowledge graphs and reasoning.
Open source framework for building optimistic rollups and L2s with shared components.
Low level instruction executed by a virtual machine such as EVM or WASM.
Widely used audited Solidity libraries and contracts for ERC standards, access control, and upgrades.
Entity that runs validator infrastructure, often on behalf of delegators or protocols.
Oblivious pseudorandom function that lets a client evaluate a PRF on its input with the server’s key without revealing the input.
Cross chain bridge that assumes messages are valid unless challenged during a dispute window.
Interactive or single step proof that shows a disputed rollup state transition is invalid.
Rollup that assumes transactions are valid by default and relies on fraud proofs during a challenge window.
Algorithm like SGD, Adam, or Lion that updates model parameters to minimize a loss.
Automated market maker that prices and settles options using pools and on chain oracles.
A service that delivers off‑chain data to on‑chain smart contracts in a verifiable way.
Oblivious RAM protocol that hides access patterns to storage from an observer.
Exchange that matches buys and sells via an order book rather than an automated market maker.
Mechanism where order flow is auctioned to builders or solvers to reduce MEV and improve price.
Mechanisms that split and route trades across venues or pools for best execution and MEV protection.
Indexing scheme that assigns serial numbers to satoshis and allows inscriptions of data on Bitcoin.
A block that is valid but not part of the final canonical chain due to reorgs.
Inputs that differ from training data, often causing unreliable model behavior.
When a model learns noise in the training set and fails to generalize to new data.
Legacy execution environment for optimistic rollups that aimed for EVM compatibility.
A signed message or on chain record that proves control of an address or asset.
P
Peer to peer networking layer that gossips blocks and transactions between nodes.
Layout optimization in EVM that packs smaller types into a single 32 byte slot to save gas.
Additively homomorphic public key encryption scheme used in privacy preserving analytics.
Cryptography using bilinear pairings on elliptic curves, enabling zkSNARKs and short signatures.
Sovereign chain that connects to a relay chain for shared security and messaging.
Execution strategy that allows independent tasks to proceed concurrently to increase throughput.
CAP property that a distributed system continues to operate despite network splits.
Using memory hard algorithms like Argon2 or scrypt with salt and pepper to store passwords safely.
Tool that generates and stores strong unique passwords, often with secure sharing and 2FA support.
Prefix tree with hash commitments used by Ethereum to store state with efficient proofs.
Bitcoin script type locking funds to a hash of a public key, redeemed with a signature.
Bitcoin script type that pays to the hash of a redeem script, enabling multisig and templates.
Component in account abstraction that sponsors gas for user operations under policy.
Off chain mechanism where parties exchange signed updates and settle on chain later.
Architecture that separates block building from proposing to mitigate MEV and improve decentralization.
Hiding and binding commitment scheme used in privacy protocols and zero knowledge proofs.
Family of methods that adapt large models by training a small subset of additional parameters.
Moving assets to and from a sidechain or bridge by locking on one chain and unlocking on the other.
Token designed to track the value of another asset like USD or BTC via collateral or algorithms.
Restricted access networks or features that require allow lists or governance approval.
Open access property of public networks where anyone can join, read, and write.
Derivative without expiry that tracks an index via funding payments between longs and shorts.
Common language modeling metric that measures how well a model predicts a sequence.
Social engineering attack where an adversary tricks a user into revealing secrets or signing malicious transactions.
Keeping IPFS content available by storing it on nodes that refuse to garbage collect the CID.
Training technique that splits model layers across devices and streams microbatches.
Early Ethereum scaling approach using child chains and exit games, largely replaced by rollups.
Plasma variant where each coin has its own history, reducing proof sizes for exits.