Glossary

The nouns, defined once. Each links back to where it does work.

cell
Where state lives, behind its own rules

A container holding balances, capability slots, and named slots, plus a predicate — a program over its own transitions the substrate enforces on every change. Nothing is ownerless; a turn touching one cell leaves every other cell untouched.

turn
The only way state changes

An atomic batch of actions, ed25519-signed by its actor. Each action presents a capability and must discharge every guard in scope. The whole turn commits or none of it does.

capability
Authority you show, not claim

An unforgeable token naming an authority over one cell — a set of rights plus a chain of restricting caveats, bound by an HMAC tag rooted in the cell's secret. Attenuable but never amplifiable. Lineage: macaroons → biscuit → the proof system.

guard
A condition a turn must discharge

The authority guard checks required ⊆ held. The predicate guard checks the target cell's program accepts the transition. An undischarged guard voids the turn.

receipt
History you can hand to a stranger

The tamper-evident record a committed turn leaves. It binds the whole post-state via a domain-tagged commitment and pins its parent by hash. Receipts chain; the chain is the history.

Q
The receipt's binding commitment

The hash a committed turn emits: q = commit(receiptBody). It opens to exactly one post-state; a second pre-image would be the only way to forge a receipt for a different state — exactly the collision-resistance assumption.

the pale ghost
The foil the proofs defeat

A server that presents a plausible state it never legitimately produced. The light client catches it: there is no verifying chain for a forged history. Summon one in the explorer.

nullifier
Why a spend can't replay

A turn's nonce, marked spent in the actor's set once it commits. Presenting it again is a double-spend and is refused for freshness. The project's namesake primitive.

sturdyref
A capability you persist and rehydrate

A durable, re-attachable reference behind a membrane. It is what a snapshot embeds so a screenshot can re-open as a per-viewer, attenuated live surface.