Glossary
Covered in this page
Section titled “Covered in this page”Every term used across the Concepts section, with a one-line definition and a link to where it is explained in full. Use your browser’s find to jump to a term.
| Term | Definition | In depth |
|---|---|---|
| Account | The standard built-in component that holds vaults and gates withdrawals by owner rule. It is the seam between public and private funds. | Templates and Assets |
| Atomic swap | A cross-party exchange that completes entirely or not at all, typically built from a stealth output with a hashlock/ timelock condition tree. | Privacy in Applications |
| Balance proof | The statement-level proof that across a stealth transfer, checked over commitments. | Privacy |
| Base layer | The upstream Minotari chain (proof of work). It supplies validator registration, the epoch clock, and the burned coins that back L2 value. | Overview |
| Base node | A node of the base layer. Ootle nodes read registrations and epoch data from it; it does not vote on Ootle state. | Architecture |
| Bucket | A transient pile of funds on a transaction’s instruction workspace. Unlike a vault, a bucket is not a substate and does not persist. | State and Execution |
| Bulletproofs+ | The range-proof system used to show a committed value is in range without revealing it. Aggregated over multiple outputs. | Privacy |
| Burn claim | The operation that mints L2 TARI against a burned base-layer output, writing a tombstone and a stealth UTXO atomically. | Tokenomics |
| Committee | The set of validators administering one shard group. The unit of consensus: HotStuff runs among committee members. | Architecture |
| Committed | Irreversible. A block is committed once the three-chain rule is satisfied on top of it — the only state that is safe to report as done. | Consensus |
| Component | A template instance with persistent state and access rules. A SubstateId variant. | State and Execution |
| Confidential | A resource type (or the privacy layer) that hides amounts while ownership remains tied to a vault’s component. | Privacy |
| Condition tree (MAST) | A Merklized set of alternative spend conditions committed by an output’s root; a spend reveals one leaf plus an inclusion proof. | Stealth Transfers |
| Covenant | A native, consensus-fixed constraint on a spending transfer’s outputs and value flow, expressed as a condition-tree atom. | Stealth Transfers |
| Epoch | A fixed number of base-layer blocks. Ootle’s membership and timing rotate on epoch boundaries. | Architecture |
| Epoch checkpoint | A committee’s end-of-epoch commit proof plus state roots for its shard group and the global shard. | State and Execution |
| Epoch oracle | The seam that reads base-layer validator registrations and epoch length, turning them into Ootle committee membership. | Architecture |
| Exhaust burn rate | exhaust_burn_rate — the per-network share of each fee that is burned: 500 bps (5%) on every network in this repository. | Tokenomics |
| Finality | Irreversibility. On Ootle a block is final when its chain reaches the three-chain rule inside its committee — not on the base layer. | Consensus |
| Global shard | Shard 0, reserved for global substates such as published templates. All other shards are numbered 1–256. | State and Execution |
| HotStuff | The chained, leader-based BFT protocol Ootle runs per shard group. (The name “Cerberus” from older design docs does not appear in the code.) | Consensus |
| HTLC | A hashed timelock contract: a spend condition requiring a preimage before a deadline, with a refund branch after. | Privacy in Applications |
| Indexer | A non-voting node that indexes blocks, transactions, substates, and events, and serves queries. | Architecture |
| Jellyfish Merkle Tree | The per-shard authenticated data structure over substate addresses; its root is the shard’s state commitment. | State and Execution |
| Justified | A block a quorum has voted for, certified by a ProposalCertificate. Weaker than locked, and much weaker than committed. | Consensus |
| Leader | The validator chosen to propose a block for a view. Selected round-robin by height % committee.len(). | Consensus |
| Liveness | The property that the chain keeps advancing. Maintained by the pacemaker; a stalled committee is re-formed at the next epoch from the base layer’s registrations. | Consensus |
| Lock (locked block) | The block a validator must not contradict. Advanced when a justified child appears; it is what keeps honest votes consistent across views. | Consensus |
| Microtari | The base unit of TARI: 1 TARI = 1_000_000 microtari (divisibility 6). Amounts in code and manifests are microtari. | Tokenomics |
| Pacemaker | The per-view timer that times out a stalled view and triggers a new-view phase. Interval is a per-network constant (10s). | Consensus |
| Pedersen commitment | A hiding, binding, homomorphic commitment , used to conceal amounts. | Privacy |
| Pledging | The protocol by which shard groups promise not to touch a transaction’s inputs while a cross-shard transaction is in flight. | Consensus |
| Preshard | One slice of the 256-way-partitioned address space (at most 256 of them; currently 256). A shard is a preshard. | Architecture |
| ProposalCertificate (PC) | A quorum’s aggregate vote for a block, making the block justified. | Consensus |
| Quorum | The n - f vote-power threshold required to certify a block, where f = floor((n - 1) / 3). It equals 2f + 1 when n = 3f + 1. | Consensus |
| Resource | The definition of an asset (kind, divisibility, supply, access rules). One of four types: public fungible, public non-fungible, confidential, stealth. | Templates and Assets |
| Safety | The property that no two honest validators commit conflicting histories. Enforced by the lock and the three-chain rule. | Consensus |
| Shard | One slice of the sharded state space, numbered 1–256. A substate’s shard is derived from the top bits of its address. | State and Execution |
| Shard group | A contiguous run of shards administered by one committee. | Architecture |
| Shard key | The address that decides which shard group a validator serves. On a live network the base layer computes it — from the node key and a base-layer block hash — and delivers it with the registration; a config-file oracle stands in for local swarms. | Architecture |
| Stablecoin | An issuance-backed asset built from ordinary primitives: the resource type sets the privacy, and the mint/redeem boundary is where supply is revealed. | Stablecoins |
| Stealth | The strongest privacy layer, and a resource type: hides both amounts and owners, with funds held as UTXOs. | Privacy |
| Stealth address | A one-time public key derived by Diffie-Hellman, unlinkable to the recipient’s real key. | Privacy |
| Substate | A versioned state value: Substate{substate, version}. One of ten variants. | State and Execution |
| Substate address | ObjectKey(32 bytes) ‖ version(u32 BE) — the address of a specific substate version. | State and Execution |
| Supply tracking | Whether a resource keeps a total-supply figure in its resource substate. Enabled, mints and burns reveal value; disabled, burns can stay hidden. | Stablecoins |
| TARI | The L2 native token — a stealth resource (TARI_TOKEN). XTR is a deprecated alias. | Tokenomics |
| Template | Ootle’s smart contract: Rust compiled to WASM and published as a global substate. | State and Execution |
| Three-chain rule | The commit rule: a block is final once three justified blocks build on it (b ← b' ← b''). | Consensus |
| TimeoutCertificate (TC) | A quorum’s aggregate timeout for a view, letting the next leader start a fresh view. | Consensus |
| Tombstone | ClaimedOutputTombstone: a marker at a commitment-derived address that prevents a burn claim from being replayed. | Tokenomics |
| TVM | The Tari Virtual Machine: Wasmer + Cranelift, metering WASM deterministically to produce a fee. | State and Execution |
| Up / Down | The two substate transitions: Up writes a new version, Down retires one. Down is not deletion — the same SubstateId can be re-created. | State and Execution |
| UTXO | An unspent output. Stealth funds are UTXOs rather than vault balances; the native token is UTXO-based. | Privacy |
| Validator node | The only node role that votes and produces finality. Runs consensus and the TVM for its shard group. | Architecture |
| Vault | A container of one resource inside a component. A SubstateId variant, persistent across transactions. | State and Execution |
| View | One step of consensus, identified by block height. A leader proposes; validators vote. | Consensus |
| View key | A key that can decrypt amounts (ElGamal, ) for auditing without the ability to spend. | Privacy |
| Wallet daemon | A non-voting node that holds keys, builds and signs transactions, and submits them via the indexer. | Architecture |