Skip to main content

Glossary

Carbon markets

EU ETS

The European Union’s Emission Trading System, the largest carbon market in the world https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-system-eu-ets_en

CCM

Compliance Carbon Markets

VCM

Voluntary Carbon Markets

MRV system

Measurement, Reporting and Verification system for greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation

Cryptography / Blockchain

VDF

Verifiable Delay Function Definition from VDFAlliance = a cryptographic primitive yielding cryptographically verifiable time delays through sequential computation

MPC

Multi Party Computation e.g. RSA MPC

SNARK

Succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge

STARK

Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge

Soundness

property of a proof system is the technical term for the property that it is impossible to "prove" a false assertion (in the system under consideration)

LMD GHOST

Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree

PoW

Proof of Work (Sybil resistance mechanism and block author selector)

PoS

Proof of Stake (Sybil resistance mechanism and block author selector)

Ethereum

EVM

Ethereum Virtual Machine https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/

RANDAO

A DAO working as RNG of Ethereum https://github.com/randao/randao

RLP

Recursive Length Prefix serialization is heavily used in Ethereum's execution clients.

See https://ethereum.org/fr/developers/docs/data-structures-and-encoding/rlp/

Merkle Patricia Trie

Merkle Patricia Trie is a data structure that stores key-value pairs combining Merkle Tree and Radix tree

More info on https://ethereum.org/fr/developers/docs/data-structures-and-encoding/patricia-merkle-trie/

MEV-Boost

"mev-boost is open source middleware run by validators to access a competitive block-building market. MEV-Boost was built by Flashbots as an implementation of proposer-builder separation (PBS) for proof-of-stake (PoS) Ethereum.

https://ethresear.ch/t/proposer-block-builder-separation-friendly-fee-market-designs/9725

Casper FFG

a proof of stake-based finality system which overlays an existing proof of work blockchain

Gasper

"a combination of Casper FFG (the Friendly Finality Gadget) and LMD GHOST (Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree)"

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1029900695925706753

Sybil resistance

From https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/ : "measures how a protocol fares against a Sybil attack. Sybil attacks are when one user or group pretends to be many users. Resistance to this type of attack is essential for a decentralized blockchain and enables miners and validators to be rewarded equally based on resources put in. Proof-of-work and proof-of-stake protect against this by making users expend a lot of energy or put up a lot of collateral. These protections are an economic deterrent to Sybil attacks."

Chain selection rule

From https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/ : "decide which chain is the ""correct"" chain. Bitcoin uses the ""longest chain"" rule, which means that whichever blockchain is the longest will be the one the rest of the nodes accept as valid and work with. For proof-of-work chains, the longest chain is determined by the chain's total cumulative proof-of-work difficulty. Ethereum used to use the longest chain rule too; however, now that Ethereum runs on proof-of-stake it adopted an updated fork-choice algorithm that measures the 'weight' of the chain. The weight is the accumulated sum of validator votes, weighted by validator staked-ether balances."

Ommer block

From https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/uncle-block-cryptocurrency.asp : It's possible for two blocks to be created simultaneously by a network. When this happens, one block will be left out. This leftover block is called an ommer block. In the past, they were called uncle blocks, referring to the familial relationships used to describe block positions within a blockchain.

Ommer is a gender-neutral term to mean “sibling of parent”; see https://nonbinary.miraheze.org/wiki/Gender_neutral_language_in_ English#Aunt/Uncle

Gas price

From the Ethereum Yellow Paper, the gas price is:

A scalar value equal to the number of Wei to be paid per unit of gas for all computation costs incurred as a result of the execution of this transaction.

Gas limit

From the Ethereum Yellow Paper, the gas limit is:

A scalar value equal to the maximum amount of gas that should be used in executing this transaction. This is paid up-front, before any computation is done and may not be increased