Skip to content
HomeEssential Cardano

Glossary

243 Results
Refine by:
Sort by:

Soft fork

Asseel Filimban
101ada+ 10
A modification to the software protocol that renders previously valid transaction blocks invalid. A soft fork is backwards-compatible since old nodes will identify the new blocks as legitimate. In contrast to a hard fork, which needs all nodes to update and agree on the new version, this type of fork merely means a majority of miners to update in order to en...
1 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Staking

Morgan
StakingStake pool+ 5
On Cardano, stake pool operators earn rewards for running the nodes that support the network and produce blocks. Staking means committing funds to a pool to support these activities. Cardano has non-custodial staking, meaning that there are no locking periods, and ada owners can spend their staked funds at any time.
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Local state

Ivan Irakoze
Smart ContractsEUTXO+ 2
This represents immutable data that makes smart contract execution on the EUTXO model highly deterministic (predictable).
1 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

TPS: transactions per second

Morgan
TPSTransactions per second+ 1
A measure of the level of activity on a blockchain. Because blockchain transactions differ from traditional payments (and between systems) by their functionality and volume, throughput is a better metric. Whereas Ethereum’s TPS only considers individual transactions, the EUTXO accounting model allows for multiple transactions to be included in a single one. ...
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Account-based model

Olga Hryniuk
Transaction
Ethereum’s transaction model through which assets are represented as balances within different accounts. Balances are updated as assets are transferred from one account to another. This model differs from Cardano’s EUTXO model which improves on Bitcoin’s basic UTXO model.
2 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Concurrency

Olga Hryniuk
EUTXOGlossary
The amount of work that can be done by different actors without blocking each other. Cardano’s EUTXO model allows transactions to be processed in parallel, which ultimately improves the throughput of the system while keeping the performance of individual operations the same.
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

UTXO: unspent transaction output

Morgan
ConsensusUTXO+ 2
An accounting model that is used by blockchains to track users’ funds and their distribution within accounts. The UTXO accounting model guarantees security, data privacy, and scalability at the core of financial activities.
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

EUTXO: extended unspent transaction output

Olga Hryniuk
EUTXOUTXO+ 2
The accounting model used by Cardano. This is an extended version of Bitcoin’s unspent transaction output model. EUTXO brings greater security, ensures fees are predictable and can process a large number of transactions in parallel. It also supports different types of assets and smart contracts, without compromising the advantages of UTXO. EUTXO’s concurrenc...
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Liquid democracy

Olga Hryniuk
VoltaireVoting+ 1
A hybrid of direct and representative democracy to be used in Voltaire. Liquid democracy enables the treasury system to take advantage of expert knowledge in a voting process, as well as ensure that all ada holders are granted an opportunity to vote. For each project, a voter can either vote directly or delegate their voting power to a member of the communit...
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Liquid staking

Olga Hryniuk
DelegationStaking
Cardano’s delegation mechanism is based on liquid staking, meaning that staked funds are never locked and can be spent at any time. Other platforms use a third-party protocol to make staked tokens liquid, which has the potential to introduce security problems.
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP)

Olga Hryniuk
Zero-knowledgeZKP+ 1
ZKP is the technology used to support applications within a multitude of settings that require a balance between privacy and integrity. Zero-knowledge proofs ensure that the verifier is not aware of the witness who evidences the truth of the provided statement, which benefits in privacy settings. Small proof sizes and fast verification time are important fo...
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Parallelism

Olga Hryniuk
EUTXOTransaction+ 1
A system’s ability to allow multiple actors to progress on their tasks simultaneously without interfering with each other. On Cardano, parallelism goes hand in hand with concurrency, another key advantage of the EUTXO model. As parallelism aligns the transactions, concurrency processes them simultaneously. Thus, the maximum achievable parallelism increases a...
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Blockademia

Marin K
BlockademiaDApp
A DApp project on Cardano that enables users to verify authenticity of any previously published document or digital file. Blockademia writes a hash of the published document in a Cardano transaction, so the published hash stays on the blockchain and enables users to quickly and easily check if any file is original or if it has been tampered with. Blockademi...
2 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Global state

Ivan Irakoze
BlockchainTransaction+ 1
A set of data that is mutable through node operations on a ledger. For example, with every transaction of an asset the database entry regarding who owns the asset changes.
1 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Tiered pricing

Ivan Irakoze
FeesThroughput+ 1
A fee structure that seeks to ensure a level of fairness in access and throughput for all Cardano blockchain users. The Cardano community decides how this pricing system will work.
1 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Throughput

Morgan
ThroughputGlossary+ 2
The volume of data processed by a system in a given amount of time. Throughput is steadily being increased on Cardano to meet the demands of an ever-growing DApp ecosystem and community of Cardano adopters.
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Fee market

Ivan Irakoze
Fees
Cardano's fee strategy is based primarily on market demand rather than the actual supply. Research continues to be done on how Cardano can evolve to offer a fair structure of fee tiers that provides the best balance between managing demand and maintaining reasonable costs. Ultimately, the Cardano community will vote on whether or not to implement this tiered...
1 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score

Babel fees

Olga Hryniuk
FeesBabel fees+ 2
A mechanism that will enable transaction fees to be paid in coins other than ada on Cardano. This ensures improved interoperability and ease of use.
0 up votes and 0 down votes. Total score
Contribute