Glossary

Active set. The validators that hold seats in the current epoch, each with a weight equal to its own plus its pool’s earning stake, in whole units. See Validators, staking and epochs.

Adjudicator. A bonded party a claim names to rule on challenges. A ruling cannot be trusted beyond the adjudicator’s own bond.

Agent Charter. A grant that lets an AI agent spend a principal’s money within caveats the protocol enforces on every payment. See Agent Charters.

Agent identity. A charter with an identity record: a card commitment and a depth in its tree. Its id is the agent’s id, written did:sion:<chain>:<id>. See Agent identities and subagents.

Allotment. A single-writer share of a bounded total, spent without consensus. See Escrow Lanes.

Anchor. A leader’s header in the consensus DAG; committing it orders its causal history.

Approval. A person’s decision on a call an agent’s session waits on, kept in the session with who made it. One given for the rest of a session never covers a payment. See What it does alone, and what it asks.

Assurance Algebra. The rules for formulas over assumptions, their cost of corruption, the decision rule, reservations and slashing. See The Assurance Algebra.

Atom. One assumption a claim rests on: a cryptographic primitive, a bond, a piece of hardware, an institution. Each has a class and, if bonded, a bond.

Attestation. A verifier’s claim (task.attestation/v1) that a task’s output passes, resting on the verifier’s bond. A result may rest on the attestations of verifiers the task names.

Autonomy level. L0 to L6: what an agent’s runtime lets it do without asking a person, from nothing at all to spending within its charter. Enforced by the runtime on the agent’s machine, not by the ledger (agent:local-policy). See What it does alone, and what it asks.

Beacon. Public randomness for each Pulse, from validators’ hash-chain reveals. It seals market batches, breaks clearing ties and seeds lane committees.

Beacon record. The beacon of a Pulse that is a multiple of 8, kept by the chain in one of 12,500 reusable slots, so a transaction can read the beacon of a Pulse fixed in advance for 100,000 Pulses (specification §6.3). Storage challenges use it.

Bond. Money posted behind an atom, slashed if a challenge against it is upheld.

Bounty. A task that names no worker: anyone may settle it with an acceptable result, and its poster may withdraw it until then.

Bridge. sion agent bridge: the process that answers a profile’s conversations on messaging services. See Messengers.

Certificate. Signatures from more than two thirds of a committee’s weight: on a transaction’s inputs (a lane certificate), or on a Pulse header (a Pulse certificate).

Chain identity. The digest a light client pins: genesis, genesis validators with stake and keys, shard layout. See The chain identity.

Challenge. A deposit-backed assertion that a bonded atom of a claim is broken, ruled on by the claim’s adjudicator.

Channel. A way to reach an agent’s profile: the terminal, HTTP, OpenAI’s chat API, A2A, a messaging service through a bridge, or an agent gateway. See Channels.

Checkpoint. A commitment, made when a payment stream opens, to every spacing-th element of the payer’s chain, as leaves of a Merkle tree. It lets the payee settle by a jump. See Payment streams.

Challenge (storage). The leaves a storage deal’s provider must show in a round, drawn from the beacon of the round’s first Pulse, which the chain records (see Beacon record). See Storage deal.

Chunk. A run of transactions (16 by default), or the deferred phase, with a statement and a witness; the unit a proof stack proves.

Claim. A statement with a formula of the atoms and other claims it rests on, appended to the knowledge log. See Claims and the knowledge log.

Commission. The share of its pool’s rewards a validator’s operator keeps: at most 25 %, effective at the epoch’s end. See Pooled stake.

Committee. The validators that certify something: the consensus committee (the active set) certifies Pulse headers and orders contended transactions; each shard’s lane committee certifies its transactions’ inputs.

Contention domain. A shared object, or a group of them, whose updates conflict and are ordered by consensus: the assurance registry, a market, a charter, a bounded total, the validator set.

Coordination class. How much ordering a transaction needs, derived from what it touches: knowledge, owned-linear, bounded or contended. See Two-sorted state.

Cost of corruption. What an attacker would have to spend or forfeit to make a claim false, under a consumer’s policy. See Cost of corruption.

Custody record. The object a storage provider owns for each deal it accepted: what proving needs (root, leaves, rounds, seed) and the rounds proven. Proofs touch only it, so proving is owned-linear.

Data-availability sampling. Checking random shares of a Pulse’s erasure-coded data so withholding is detected with high probability. See Data availability.

Decision rule. Rely on a claim for value V only if its cost of corruption, discounted for detection and capped by the adjudicator, is at least κ·V, and that much backing is unreserved. See The decision rule.

Delegation. An object its delegator owns that holds shares of a validator’s pool: stake added to the validator’s weight without handing it over. See Pooled stake.

Deferred phase. The last part of a Pulse: commutative effects in canonical order, forced-intent posting, and scheduled events such as batch sealing and epoch ends.

Devnet. A whole network in one process, for development and demonstration (sion devnet).

Dream. sion memory dream: reading an agent’s past sessions and keeping a note only if its session says the words the note quotes and, with --eval, only if no task held out does worse with the notes in mind. See Memory.

Epoch. A run of Pulses with one validator set. Committees change at epoch boundaries. See Epochs and committees.

Equivocation. Signing two conflicting messages: two consensus headers for one round, or two live lane approvals of one object version. Reporting it slashes the signer’s stake.

Escrow Lanes. Splitting a shared total into single-writer allotments so most updates need no consensus.

Forced intent. A transaction posted straight to consensus, bypassing the gateway. Once committed, it is an obligation of its sender’s shard.

Gateway. The devnet component that routes transactions to lane committees and hands certificates to consensus.

Genesis. The initial state and parameters; its digest is part of the chain identity.

Jump. A settlement’s proof by checkpoint: the checkpoint just below the settled position and its Merkle path. It costs at most spacing + 21 hashes, however many payments it covers.

κ (kappa). The safety factor of the decision rule; 2 by default.

Knowledge log. The grow-only Merkle log of claims (RFC 9162).

Lane epoch. The identifier of a lane committee: the validator-set epoch and the shard’s rotations in it. Approvals from one lane epoch never count in another.

Leaf. One piece of a storage deal’s data, at most 4 KiB; the deal commits to the Merkle root over the leaves’ hashes.

Light client. A client that checks headers, receipts, state and data with proofs against a pinned chain identity, without executing the chain.

Linear Lanes. Certifying owned-object transactions with one committee certificate and no consensus. See Linear Lanes.

Memory atom. One statement in a memory log: what was observed or asserted, when it held, where, with what confidence, and what it rests on. See Memory for agents and robots.

Memory log. A log of memory atoms that only its writer appends to, kept off the ledger. The ledger keeps its head and moves it only along a consistency proof, so the log only grows (specification v1.9).

Micro-unit. 10⁻⁶ of an asset; the unit amounts are stored in.

Neo-blockchain. A network whose product is verified knowledge, not ordered transactions. See Neo-blockchains.

Obligation. A forced intent a shard owes, held in the state with a deadline.

Operator. The account that stakes for a validator and receives its rewards and withdrawals.

Overseer. For an agent identity: its backer, its principal, or the agent of any charter above it. Any overseer may suspend or revoke it.

Pairing code. A code a bridge gives someone who writes to it directly and whom it does not know. Once the operator approves it, that chat is let in, on that channel and profile. See Pairing and voice.

Payment stream. Escrow from one payer for one payee, paid off the ledger by revealing a hash chain’s elements, one per payment, and settled by the payee in batches. See Payment streams.

Pool. A validator’s delegated stake, divided into shares, in the delegation book. Earning shares share the validator’s rewards; all shares share its slashing.

Policy. A consumer’s view of which atoms and classes to trust, distrust or assume broken, and its κ.

Profile. How an agent runs on a machine: the agent identity and wallet it acts as, its model, autonomy level, tools, workspace and memory log. sion setup makes one called assistant. See Profiles and schedules.

Proof stack. An implementation of chunk proving and verification. Stack A replays with the reference executor; stack B replays with an independent implementation of the specification.

Pulse. The network’s heartbeat: a batch of execution with a certified header, published data and a World Proof. See Pulses.

Quarantine. Holding what tools return from outside out of an agent’s conversation: a separate call of the model, with no tools, answers questions about it to a schema the agent gives. See What it does alone, and what it asks.

Quorum. More than two thirds of a committee’s weight: ⌊2·total/3⌋ + 1.

Receipt. A transaction’s effects, proven against a certified header’s receipts root; for agent payments, also a receipt claim.

Reservation. The share of a claim’s backing (κ·V) a consumer reserves when it relies on the claim, so no claim is relied on beyond its backing. See Reservations.

Result claim. A worker’s claim (task.result/v1) that commits to a task and its output, with exactly the formula the task requires.

Rotation. Replacing a shard’s lane committee after it misses a forced-inclusion deadline.

Session. One consensus DAG. A new session starts at every epoch boundary and every restart.

Session (agent). One conversation’s run of an agent: its messages, calls, approvals and journal. It pauses while it waits for a person and resumes where it stopped.

Shard. A partition of accounts, each with its own lane committee.

Skill. A directory of instructions and files an agent reads when it needs them. Others’ skills are installed from releases backed by bonds and audits. See Skills from others.

Slashing. Forfeiting a bond (for a false claim) or a validator’s stake (for equivocation).

Storage deal. Escrow from a client for a provider who keeps data whose Merkle root the deal fixes and proves each round that it still holds it; paid per proven round, with collateral forfeited for missed or abandoned rounds. See Storage deals.

Specification. docs/spec/state-transition.md, the normative description of the state transition. See The state transition specification.

Standby validator. A devnet validator that runs without a seat until its operator stakes for it.

Stake. What a validator deposits to join; its weight in committees and what it forfeits if it equivocates. Delegators add stake to a validator’s pool (see Delegation).

State root. The root of the sparse Merkle tree over every object.

Stream desk. The payee’s side of payment streams in sion_cli: it checks each payment with one hash, decides when to settle, and settles by walk or jump.

Subagent. An agent launched by another with SpawnAgents: its own identity, account, card and budget, with caveats and a token bucket carved from its parent’s.

Task. Escrow for a piece of work, with the rule a result must pass fixed when it is posted (specification v1.10). See Task Charters.

Taint. The mark on an agent’s session for 24 hours after it reads content from outside: until then its external calls and its spending wait for a person, at any autonomy level. See What it does alone, and what it asks.

The Fold. Folding every chunk proof of a Pulse into one World Proof. See The Fold and World Proofs.

Tombstone. What a consumed object becomes: it keeps its identifier, owner and version, so history stays auditable.

Transaction time. For a memory atom: the Pulse of the commit that added it to its log, assigned by the ledger, not by the writer. Its valid time, when the statement held, is the writer’s.

Two-sorted state. Linear objects that are consumed at most once, and knowledge that is only appended.

Unbonding. The Pulses an exited validator’s stake, or an undelegated delegation’s, stays locked, and slashable, before it can be withdrawn.

Validator set. The state object holding every validator’s record, the active set, the epoch and its parameters.

Verifiable Clearing. Settling a market batch only with a certificate that no better allocation exists. See Verifiable Clearing.

Weight. A validator’s own plus its pool’s earning stake in whole units of the stake asset: its voting weight in the consensus committee.

Witness. The objects a chunk touches, with state proofs, plus the knowledge log’s frontier: what a stateless verifier needs to re-execute it.

World Proof. The proof that one Pulse’s transition is valid, binding its receipts, data and lane certificates. See The World Proof format.

x402. HTTP 402 Payment Required, used to sell an API per request. See x402.