Glossary

Every term this documentation uses, in one line each. If something here is still unclear, ask us at support.l2protocol.com.

The basics

Address. Where coins live. A public string beginning with 0x, safe to share, that anyone can look up on the explorer.

Wallet. The program that holds the private key behind your address and signs on your behalf. See Get a wallet.

Seed phrase. The twelve or twenty-four words your wallet is built from. Anyone holding them owns the coins. Never typed into anything, ever.

Private key. The half of your key pair that signs. Your seed phrase is a readable form of it.

Signature. Proof that the holder of an address agreed to something. Signing a message is free and moves nothing; signing a transaction sends it.

Transaction. One thing that happened on the chain, with its own page on the explorer.

Chain id. The number that identifies this chain, 12216. Wallets use it to tell one network from another.

RPC endpoint. The address your wallet or tooling talks to in order to reach the chain.

Blocks and fees

Block. A batch of transactions written to the chain, produced roughly every 1.5 seconds.

Chain head. The most recent block.

Finalized. A block that can no longer be replaced, whatever happens next on the network. See Blocks, and what finalized means.

Confirmations. How many blocks have been produced since the one your transaction is in.

Gas. A measure of how much work a transaction is. See Gas and transaction fees.

Gwei. A billionth of an L2P, the unit gas prices are quoted in.

Wei. The smallest unit of L2P. One L2P is a 1 followed by eighteen zeros in wei.

Fee burn. The share of every transaction fee destroyed instead of paid out. See Fee burn.

Burn address. 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD, an address nobody holds the key to. Coins sent there can never move again.

Staking

Validator. A computer that produces and signs blocks, and the operator running it.

Delegating. Putting your L2P behind a validator to earn a share of what it earns. See Delegate to a validator.

Self delegation. The stake a validator puts up out of its own pocket, and the first thing cut when it is punished.

Stake credit. Your share of one validator's pool, which grows as rewards are added.

Elected. In the active set and producing blocks. A validator can be registered without being elected.

Cabinet. The validators that actually take turns producing blocks.

Candidate. A registered validator waiting to rotate into a producing slot.

Commission. The share of your rewards the validator keeps.

Unbonding. The waiting period between undelegating and being able to claim, currently seven days.

Redelegating. Moving stake straight from one validator to another, for a fee, without waiting.

Slashing. Stake cut as a punishment. See What governance can change.

Jailed. Benched after a punishment, and earning nothing until released.

Downtime. Missing too many blocks. The lighter of the two offences.

Double sign. Signing two conflicting blocks. The serious one, and there is no honest reason to do it.

Emissions. New L2P created per block and paid to validators, on a fixed ten-year schedule. See The emission schedule.

Running a node

Node. A computer running the chain software, keeping its own copy of the chain.

Consensus address. The account your node signs blocks with.

Vote address. Your node's BLS public key, used for fast finality voting.

BLS proof. A signature proving you hold the private half of that vote key. See Create your validator.

Operator address. The wallet that registered the validator and receives its commission.

Syncing. Catching up with the chain from the block your node last knew about.

Peers. The other nodes yours is connected to.

Propagation. How long a node takes to hear about a new block.

Governance

Proposal. A request to change something about the chain, put to a vote.

govL2P. The voting power minted against staked L2P. It is what the governor counts, and it cannot be transferred.

Snapshot block. The block at which your voting power is measured for one proposal. Coins staked afterwards do not count for it.

Quorum. The minimum turnout for a vote to be valid.

Timelock. The delay between a proposal passing and anyone being able to execute it.

Queue. Handing a passed proposal to the timelock to start that delay.

Execute. Applying a passed proposal once the timelock has expired. Anyone may do it.

Parameter. A setting on a system contract that governance can change. See What governance can change.

Names

.l2p name. A readable name, such as yourname.l2p, that points at an address. See What a .l2p name is.

Primary name. The name a wallet chooses to be shown under. It has to point back at that wallet.

Commitment. The sealed first transaction of a registration, which hides the name for a minute so nobody can snatch it.

Grace period. The 90 days after a name expires in which it can still be extended and nobody else can take it.

Resolver. The contract that stores what a name points at and its records.

Contracts and tokens

Smart contract. A program living at its own address on the chain.

System contract. One of the contracts that runs the chain itself. See System contracts.

Verified contract. One whose published source has been proven to match the code on the chain. See Smart contracts on the explorer.

ABI. The description of a contract's functions, which lets tools read and call it.

Token. Something created inside a contract, as opposed to L2P itself, which is the chain's own coin.

NFT. A token where each item is individual rather than interchangeable.

Proxy. A contract that forwards everything to a second contract holding the actual logic.

Around the chain

Explorer. The public record of everything on the chain, at l2pscan.com.

Block explorer API. The same data as an API, with no key required. See The explorer API.

Indexer. A service that reads the chain and stores what it finds, so a site can answer questions the chain itself would be slow at.

Community vote. The election that decides which project gets the next chain. See How the vote works.