Glossary

• Address: A unique public alphanumeric identifier used to designate the identity of an entity on the Linera network.

• Admin Chain: The Linera Network has one designated admin chain where validators can join or leave and where new epochs are defined.

• Application: Similar to a smart-contract on Ethereum, an application is code deployed on the Linera network which is executed by all validators. An application has a metered contract which executes 'business logic' and modifies state and an unmetered 'service' which is a read-only view into an application's state.

• Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT): A system which can operate correctly and achieve consensus even if components of the system fail or act maliciously.

• Block Height: The number of blocks preceding a given block on a specific microchain.

• Block Proposal: A candidate block proposed by a chain owner which may be selected at the next block height.

• Bytecode: A collection of bytes corresponding to a program that can be run by the Wasm virtual machine.

• Client: The linera program, which is a local node and wallet operated by users to make requests to the network. In Linera, clients drive the network by proposing new blocks and validators are mostly reactive.

• Certificate: A value with signatures from a quorum of validators. Values can be confirmed blocks, meaning that the block has been added to the chain and is final. There are other values that are used for reaching consensus, before certifying a confirmed block.

• Committee: The set of all validators for a particular epoch, together with their voting weights.

• Chain Owner: The owner of a user chain or permissioned chain. This is represented as the alphanumeric identifier derived from the hash of the owner's public key.

• Channel: A broadcast mechanism enabling publish-subscribe behavior across chains.

• Contract: The metered part of an application which executes business logic and can modify the application's state.

• Cross-Application Call: A call from one application to another on the same chain.

• Cross-Chain Message: A message containing a data payload which is sent from one chain to another. Cross-Chain messages are the asynchronous communication primitive which enable communication on the same application running on different chains.

• Devnet: An experimental deployment of the Linera protocol meant for testing and development. In a Devnet, the validator nodes are often run by the same operator for simplicity. Devnets may be shut down and restarted from a genesis configuration any time. Devnets do not handle real assets.

• Epoch: A period of time when a particular set of validators with particular voting weights can certify new blocks. Since each chain has to transition explicitly from one epoch to the next, epochs can overlap.

• Genesis Configuration: The configuration determining the state of a newly created network; the voting weights of the initial set of validators, the initial fee structure, and initial chains that the network starts with.

• Inbox: A commutative data structure storing incoming messages for a given chain.

• Mainnet: A deployment meant to be used in production, with real assets.

• Message: See 'Cross-Chain Message'.

• Microchain: A lightweight chain of blocks holding a subset of the network's state running on every validator. This is used interchangeably with 'chain'. All Linera chains are microchains.

• Network: The totality of all protocol participants. A network is the combination of committee, clients and auditors.

• Operation: Operations are either transactions directly added to a block by the creator (and signer) of the block, or calls to an application from another. Users typically use operations to start interacting with an application on their own chain.

• Permissioned Chain: A microchain which is owned by more than one user. Users take turns proposing blocks and the likelihood of selection is proportional to their weight.

• Project: The collection of files and dependencies which are built into the bytecode which is instantiated as an application on the Linera Network.

• Public Chain: A microchain with full BFT consensus with a strict set of permissions relied on for the operation of the network.

• Quorum: A set of validators representing > ⅔ of the total stake. A quorum is required to create a certificate.

• Single-Owner Chain: See 'User Chain'.

• Service: An unmetered read-only view into an application's state.

• Shard: A logical subset of all microchains on a given validator. This corresponds directly to a physical worker.

• Stake: An amount of tokens pledged by a validator or auditor, as a collateral to guarantee their honest and correct participation in the network.

• Testnet: A deployment of the Linera protocol meant for testing and development. In a Testnet, the validator nodes are operated by multiple operators. Testnets will gain in stability and decentralization over time in preparation of the mainnet launch. Testnets do not handle real assets.

• User Chain: Used interchangeably with Single-Owner Chain. User chains are chains which are owned by a single user on the network. Only the chain owner can propose blocks, and therefore only the chain owner can forcibly advance the state of a user chain.

• Validator: Validators run the servers that allow users to download and create blocks. They validate, execute and cryptographically certify the blocks of all the chains.

• View: Views are like an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) for mapping complex types onto key-value stores. Views group complex state changes into a set of elementary operations and commit them atomically. They are full or partial in-memory representations of complex types saved on disk in a key-value store

• Wallet: A file containing a user's public and private keys along with configuration and information regarding the chains they own.

• WebAssembly (Wasm): A binary compilation target and instruction format that runs on a stack-based VM. Linera applications are compiled to Wasm and run on Wasm VMs inside validators and clients.

• Web3: A natural evolution of the internet focusing on decentralization by leveraging blockchains and smart contracts.

• Worker: A process which runs a subset of all microchains on a given validator. This corresponds directly to a logical shard.