Glossary

Definitions of some technical terms used throughout the documentation.

TermMeaning

EVM

Ethereum Virtual Machine

DeFi

Decentralized Finance

DB

Database

rdPoS

Random Deterministic Proof-of-Stake

RLP

Recursive-Length Prefix

BDK

Blockchain Development Kit

NFT

Non-Fungible Token

RPC

Remote Procedure Call

UTXO

Unspent Transaction Output (commonly used by Bitcoin-derived chains, analogous to Accounts, used by Ethereum-derived chains)

Secp256k1

The elliptic curve used for Bitcoin’s public key cryptography

Token table

A record of the token balances on each subnet, held by AppLayerLabs

Block race condition

A situation where multiple blocks compete for the position of the next block in the chain

Block congestion system

A component that manages the registration of blocks in the blockchain

RNG

Random Number Generator, a component in charge of making validator selection unpredictable

Master address

The address that adds validators to the network in a centralized implementation

Transpiler

A program that converts source code written in a specific programming language into its equivalent in another language

Constructor

A function that initializes the state variables of a contract

Pointer

An item that shows where data is stored and helps verify it

Sandbox

An isolated testing environment for experimenting with code

Merkle tree

An abstract data type with leaves (nodes) holding cryptographic hashes of data blocks while nodes that aren’t leaves have cryptographic hashes of their child nodes

Last updated