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Glossary

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Slashing

Morgan
A penalty charge on some proof-of-stake blockchains for dishonest behavior by network validators. There is no slashing on Cardano. Instead, Ouroboros provides incentives for good behavior. Each stake pool operator pledges funds to their pool to make it more attractive and earn a higher percentage of rewards. Dishonest behavior will result in loss of rewards....
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Sidechain

Morgan
A blockchain that runs independently alongside the main chain and is linked to it. Transactions are transferred to the sidechain for processing and the results are sent back, thus taking a load off the main chain. This improves speed, lowers execution fees, and increases overall throughput.
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Script

Morgan
Smart contract conditions coded to be automatically executed on the blockchain.
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Token

Morgan
A cryptographic token that represents a footprint of value defined by the community, market state, or self-governed entity. A token can be fungible (tradable) or non-fungible (unique), and act as a payment unit, reward, trading asset, or information holder.
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Project Catalyst

Morgan
Project Catalyst is a decentralized innovation fund for Cardano projects set up in 2020. Within two years, 30,000 members had set hundreds of projects underway with a treasury worth $1 billion ada. The project marked the start of Cardano’s Voltaire phase and is one of the world’s largest examples of on-chain governance.
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Plutus

Morgan
A programming language and a set of tools for writing and testing smart contracts to be used on Cardano. Plutus is based on Haskell and provides a safe, full-stack programming environment.
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Ouroboros Praos

Olga Hryniuk
This version of Ouroboros was deployed in August 2020. Praos introduced decentralized block production by stake pools. It also implemented a novel incentive mechanism for participating in block production and introduced mechanisms to defend against Sybil attacks.
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Ouroboros Crypsinous

Olga Hryniuk
The Crypsinous version of Ouroboros aims to provide security against adaptive attacks and introduces secure encryption relying on Snarks. Crypsinous is currently not planned for deployment on Cardano.
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Ouroboros Classic

Olga Hryniuk
A version of Ouroboros deployed on Cardano in December 2017. It established the foundation for an energy-efficient, proof-of-stake consensus protocol.
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Ouroboros Chronos

Olga Hryniuk
A version of Ouroboros designed to use a system clock based on blockchain technology. This removes the potential for attacks on blockchains that rely on external time sources such as the internet’s Network Time Protocol.
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Ouroboros BFT

Olga Hryniuk
A version of Ouroboros deployed in May 2020 to prepare Cardano for decentralization as part of the Shelley development phase.
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Oracle

Olga Hryniuk
A service to transfer information from the real world to smart contracts. The oracle fetches and authenticates live data such as exchange rates and weather conditions to provide this data for smart contracts.
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Transaction (tx)

Morgan
The process of sending or receiving assets on the blockchain.
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Networking

Olga Hryniuk
A technical infrastructure linking Cardano nodes in one unified system to process transactions. Stake pool operators run Cardano nodes that communicate with other nodes to share information about new blocks and transactions. This includes three processes: each operator runs a block-producing node (the node that verifies and creates a block) and two relay nod...
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Native tokens

Olga Hryniuk
Native tokens is the feature that lets users create their own tokens on Cardano and these interact with the blockchain just like ada. Tokens can be fungible (interchangeable) or non-fungible (unique), and act as payment units, rewards, trading assets, or information holders. There is no need to create smart contracts to handle native tokens, which removes a ...
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Multi-asset

Olga Hryniuk
Cardano can support more than one asset type, including user-defined tokens.
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UTXO Alliance

Morgan
A group formed to encourage collaboration on making the unspent transaction output (UTXO) model more scalable, secure, and interoperable. Formed by Input Output Global, Ergo, Nervos, Komodo, and Topl.
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Market capitalization

Olga Hryniuk
A measure used by crypto exchanges to rank coins. The ‘market cap’ is calculated by multiplying the number of coins in circulation by the coin price on the day.
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Mainnet

Olga Hryniuk
The live blockchain. Cardano upgrades are assessed on a testnet before being released on the mainnet.
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