The Cardano Glossary

peer-to-peer. Sending transactions or sharing files directly between nodes in a decentralized system without depending on a centralized authority.

A physical document containing your private key or seed phrase.

Passive income is money produced from investments that do not require the earner to be actively involved.

the process by which nodes find each other on the network and initiate contact.

The decentralized interactions between parties in a distributed network, partitioning tasks or workloads between peers.

Crypto P2P lending refers to a practice of lending assets without the involvement of a middleman. Such loans rely on collateral material originally owned by borrowers.

A stablecoin is a currency whose value is pegged to a real-world asset, such as a fiat currency.

a measure of the efficency of a stake pool, given as a percentage, is measured by how many blocks the stake pool has produced (and that are recorded on the main chain) compared to how many it was nominated to produce. For example, if a pool only produces half the number of blocks that were nominated, its performance rating is 50%. This could happen because the pool has a poor network connection, or has been turned off by its operator. Performance ratings make more sense over a longer period of time.

A ledger designed with restrictions, such that only people or organizations requiring access have permission to access it.

Often used to describe blockchains, a system is said to be permissionless when there is no entity that can regulate who can use it and how it can be used.

When a scammer pretends to be a trusted institution or person to trick people into revealing sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, passwords, banking details, etc., often through a malware link disguised as legitimate.

The play-to-earn business model supports the notion of an open economy and gives financial rewards to players who bring value to its metaverse.

The play-to-earn business model supports the notion of an open economy and gives financial rewards to players who bring value to its metaverse.

Player payouts is a new way of automatically paying online gaming participants immediately after the tournament ends.

a Turing-complete programming platform for writing functional smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. Plutus is based on the Haskell programming language.

an executable program used in the ledger to perform additional (phase two) transaction validation.

A fraudulent investment involving the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors.

A collection of cryptocurrencies or crypto assets held by an investment company, hedge fund, financial institution or individual.

Pre-IDO refers to token offerings before the actual initial DEX offering (IDO) takes place.

The sale of a cryptocurrency, ahead of it going public, to specific investors.

A private blockchain is a type of blockchain in which only a single organization has authority over the network.

A piece of code generated in asymmetric-key encryption process, paired with a public key, to be used in decrypting information hashed with the public key.

the number of blocks that have been produced by a stake pool in the current epoch. Stake pools are rewarded in ada for each block that they produce.

the percentage of total ada rewards that the stake pool operator takes before sharing the rest of the rewards between all the delegators to the pool. A lower profit margin for the operator means they are taking less, which means that delegators can expect to receive more of the rewards for their delegated stake. A private pool is a pool with a profit margin of 100%, meaning that all the rewards will go to the operator and none to the delegators.

Programmability implies that something is capable of following instructions.

Project Catalyst is a series of experiments which seeks to generate the highest levels of community innovation. Catalyst is bringing on-chain governance to the Cardano blockchain by allowing the community to self-determine priorities for growth. It also lets participants deploy funding to proposals which tackle challenges and capitalize on opportunities that arise in the life cycle of Cardano.

A blockchain consensus mechanism in addition to Proof-of-Work that maintains the integrity of blockchain.

Proof-of-validation (PoV) is a unique proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism that works to achieve consensus through staked validator nodes.

A blockchain consensus mechanism involving solving of computationally intensive puzzles to validate transactions and create new blocks. *see Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

A proposal is an idea submission to Project Catalyst that someone or a group wants to get funded. Proposals are made to address a specific challenge outlined in the funding round.

A proposer is someone who takes their idea and creates a proposal in Project Catalyst with the aim to get funding from the community treasury. Anyone can become a proposer whether that is an individual, a group of people or an organisation.

The set of rules that define interactions on a network, usually involving consensus, transaction validation, and network participation on a blockchain.

A public address is the cryptographic hash of a public key, allowing the user to use it as an address to request for payment.

A blockchain that can be accessed by anyone.

A public key refers to a series of alphanumeric characters used to encrypt plain text messages into ciphertext.

A form of fraud involving the artificial inflation of the price of a cryptocurrency with false and misleading positive statements.

A put option contract offers an owner the opportunity, but not the compulsion, to buy an underlying security at a certain price within a given time frame.

A pyramid scheme is a scam with a hierarchical top-down structure.