- Anchor (peers)
- A configured bootstrap peer treated as a trust root for connectivity. Protected from pruning and watched for eclipse.
- Anchor (shielded)
- A recent root of the note-commitment tree that a spend proves membership against.
- Base fee
- The per-gas price the protocol sets from the parent block's utilization. Burned.
- Certificate
- Signatures from validators holding more than two thirds of voting power, for one block in one view.
- Compact block
- A scan-only summary of a block's shielded data, which a wallet authenticates against the block header.
- Control transaction
- An authorization change: grant, revoke, rotate root, set reserve. Ordered before user transactions in every block.
- DIRECT, ROOT, SESSION
- The three authority modes: one address key, a threshold of root keys, or a policy-bound session key.
- Epoch
- 192 slots by default. Validator sets and rewards change at epoch boundaries.
- Equivocation
- A validator signing two conflicting messages for the same view. Slashable.
- Grant
- An on-chain record that authorizes one session key under one policy for a range of block heights.
- Lock
- A validator's durable commitment to a block it precommitted. Survives restarts and is released only by a newer certificate.
- Manifest and commitment
- The canonical list of consensus constants, and its Keccak-256 hash written into genesis.
- Nullifier
- A unique tag published when a shielded note is spent. A repeated nullifier is a double spend.
- Policy
- The built-in rules a session's actions must satisfy. It never executes contract code.
- Security reserve
- Balance that sessions cannot touch, kept for emergency root actions.
- Slot, round, view
- A slot is a 2 s timing unit with up to 3 rounds; a view is a (slot, round) pair.
- Turnstile
- The public accounting of value entering and leaving the shielded pool.
- VRF
- Verifiable random function: each validator's private lottery for proposing, with a public proof.
- Watermark
- A persisted record of the highest view a validator has signed, used to refuse anything conflicting or older.
