Glossary
The terms used across these docs.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Account | A balance in the vault, named by 32 bytes: the first key its owner generated. |
| Account name | The bytes32 that identifies an account. Not an Ethereum address. |
| Authentication path | The sibling hashes from a leaf to the root of its tree; part of every signature. |
| Backing | The tokens the vault holds for all accounts (totalBacking). |
| Bundler | An ERC-4337 service that submits UserOperations to the EntryPoint. |
| Chain (hash chain) | A value hashed repeatedly; the unit a Winternitz signature is made of. |
| Donation | Tokens added to the backing without minting shares; raises the value of every share. |
| EntryPoint | The ERC-4337 contract that validates and executes UserOperations and holds accounts' gas deposits. |
| Epoch | How many times an account has changed its key. Part of every signed digest. |
| Exit | Tokens leaving the vault: to an address, or to an exit target. |
| Exit target | A contract that handles an exit in the same operation; the router is one. |
| Guardian | The one role on the vault: can pause new entries, nothing else. |
| Harvest | The permissionless call that collects creator fees and puts them to work. |
| Key | 32 bytes committing to a public seed, a tree height and a Merkle root of one-time keys. |
| Leaf | One one-time key of a tree. Signs one operation. |
| Network fee | The flat fee, in the token, an account pays for an operation sent with no wallet. Donated to all accounts. |
Operation (Op) | What an owner signs: any combination of a transfer, an exit and a key change. |
| Poke | Updating the vault's price average from the market. Permissionless. |
| Price average | The vault's exponential moving average of the market price, in tokens per ETH. |
| Seed (public) | 32 bytes, part of every signature, mixed into every hash of a key. |
| Secret | The 32 bytes every key of an account derives from; shown as 24 words. |
| Shares | The unit accounts are counted in. Their value in the token rises with donations. |
| Shield | Moving tokens into the vault under an account. |
| Tweakable hash | A hash that takes a public seed and a position word, so no value is useful anywhere else. |
| Unshield | Exiting to an address as the token. |
| WOTS | Winternitz one-time signature. |
| XMSS | The standard construction (RFC 8391) of a Merkle tree over Winternitz keys. |