Glossary#

Net coins terms quickly. This is the one-line version of each; the linked page is the long one.

The stack#

Bus — the core event bus. Shards, ring buffers, batch workers, adapters. Everything else is built on it. See Using the Event Bus.

RedEX — a channel turned into a durable, append-only log you can replay from any cursor. See Durable logs.

CortEX — the fold driver. Runs deterministic reductions over RedEX logs to materialize state. See Folded state.

NetDB — a query surface over folded state. See Querying with NetDB.

MeshDB — the federated query layer: time-travel, lineage, cross-chain joins across channels and nodes.

Dataforts — content-addressed blob storage with a greedy-LRU cache and gravity-based placement. See Blob storage.

MeshOS — the cluster behaviour engine: long-lived stateful daemons, placed by capability, migrating without losing causal continuity. See Daemons and placement.

nRPC — typed request/response over channels. Unary, server-streaming, client-streaming, and duplex. See Typed RPC with nRPC.

Deck — the operator TUI. See Deck.

Core nouns#

Channel — a named, hierarchical endpoint (vehicles/fleet-7/telemetry). The only abstraction most code touches. See Channels.

Event — a payload plus an origin identity and a causal lineage.

Cursor — an opaque resumption token (next_id). Encodes each shard's stream position; persist it and hand it back unchanged to resume.

Shard — one of num_shards independent ring buffers. Ingest hashes an event onto a shard; one batch worker drains each.

Adapter — where events actually go: Noop, Redis, JetStream, or the mesh (Net). The bus's storage/transport seam.

Fold — a deterministic reduction of a log into state. Re-running a fold over the same log always yields the same state, which is why restart recovery is re-reading rather than restoring.

Capability — an advertised ability, carried as tags, discoverable across the mesh. Discovery is advisory: it says who can, not who will. See Capabilities.

Subnet — a routing and visibility boundary within a mesh. See Subnets.

Identity and authorization#

Entity / EntityId — a 32-byte ed25519 public key. Identity is bound to a keypair, not an address.

origin_hash / node_id — 4- and 8-byte values derived from an EntityId by domain-separated BLAKE2s-MAC. The header carries origin_hash so forwarding decisions need no crypto.

PSK — the 32-byte pre-shared key both sides of a Noise NKpsk0 handshake must hold. A mesh-membership secret you distribute yourself.

Permission token — a 161-byte signed grant (scope bitfield, channel, validity window, delegation depth, nonce). Verified at subscription time, cached for the packet path.

AuthGuard — the bloom filter plus verified-positive cache that answers per-packet authorization in under 10 ns. See Security model.

Scheduling#

Island — a co-located pool of exclusive units (a GPU NVLink domain being the motivating case). The unit of exclusivity for a claim.

Gang claim — an atomic compare-and-swap reservation of a whole island under contention. See Claiming a contended resource.

Gravity — the placement pressure that pulls blobs toward the code that reads them.

Task — a single-writer RedEX chain whose state is the fold of its transitions. See Task lifecycle.

Payments#

x402 — the payment wire protocol Net wraps. Net signs around it and never re-serializes it. See x402 and Net.

X402Carry — an x402 document carried as base64 of its original bytes, so signatures survive crossing meshes and language boundaries.

Facilitator — the service that verifies and settles an x402 payment. Never in the trust root above observed.

Verification tier — observed | confirmed(n) | final. A facilitator receipt only ever yields observed. See Verification tiers.

Quote — a signed, expiring net.payment.quote@1 binding a caller to terms.

Spend policy — the caller-side engine that clears, holds, or denies a spend before money leaves. The model requests; the policy decides.

Terms that mean something specific here#

Advisory — informational, not binding. Discovery is advisory; a claim is not.

Fails closed — on doubt, deny. The regex feature without the flag, a facilitator that can't answer, a signer asked for the wrong scheme.

Byte-preserving — carried as the original bytes rather than re-encoded, so signatures still verify. A law in the payments layer.

Submitted is not completed — accepting work is not doing it. See Submitted Is Not Completed.