This glossary defines key terms used throughout StellarForge's contracts, SDK, and documentation, spanning Real World Assets (RWA), Soroban smart contracts, and the Stellar network.
- Address: A Stellar public key (
G...) or Soroban contract identifier (C...) representing an account, signer, or contract instance. - Allowance: The pre-authorized amount of an asset that an owner permits a designated spender to transfer or burn on their behalf, typically scoped with an expiration ledger.
- Asset Code: An alphanumeric identifier (1–12 characters) naming a Stellar token (e.g.,
USD,TBILL). - Asset Issuer: The administrative identity authorized to mint, burn, or manage compliance for a tokenized asset.
- Attestation: Cryptographic or regulatory proof confirming off-chain facts, such as audit results, reserve backing, or KYC status.
- Auth Tree (Authorization Tree): The hierarchical structure of authorizations signed by accounts for Soroban contract invocations, including nested sub-invocations.
- Basis Points (bps): A unit equal to 1/100th of 1% (0.0001). Commonly used for percentage parameters, fee calculations, and deviation boundaries (e.g., 5,000 bps = 50%).
- Burn: The permanent destruction and reduction of circulating token supply by the owner, authorized spender, or protocol admin.
- Clawback: An administrative regulatory capability allowing an authorized issuer to revoke and reclaim tokens from an account due to legal, fraud, or sanction actions.
- Compliance Contract: A Soroban contract implementing identity verification, sanction checks, transfer rules, and regulatory permissions for RWA assets.
- Compliance Level: A numerical integer tier (e.g., Tier 1, Tier 2) representing the verification status of an account (e.g., accredited, qualified institutional, retail).
- Contract Data: State stored on-chain by a Soroban contract, categorized into Persistent, Temporary, or Instance storage.
- Decimals: The number of digits of precision following the decimal point for asset units (commonly 7 on Stellar, or standard 18).
- Deposit: Locking underlying collateral or base currency into a contract (such as a Vault) in exchange for newly minted derivative shares.
- Deviation Guard: A safeguard preventing an oracle price report from altering net asset value by more than a configured percentage threshold (
max_deviation_bps) in a single tick.
- Escrow: A smart contract or custody arrangement where funds are held until predefined programmatic conditions are met.
- Event: An append-only log record emitted by a contract invocation containing topic symbols and data payloads for indexers and subscribers.
- Expiration Ledger: The ledger sequence number after which an allowance, proposal, or lockup period ceases to be valid.
- Footprint: The set of ledger keys that a Soroban transaction reads or writes, declared prior to execution to enable parallel transaction validation.
- Freeze / Pause: An administrative intervention halting token transfers, minting, or contract interactions during security incidents or regulatory holds.
- Friendbot: A testnet faucet service providing free test lumens (XLM) to fund developer accounts.
- Horizon: The REST API client server for indexing and querying Stellar ledger transactions, accounts, and payments.
- Instance Storage: Contract storage tied directly to the contract instance executable and metadata, sharing its lifecycle.
- Invariant: A fundamental system property that must remain strictly true before and after every valid transaction (e.g., total supply equals the sum of account balances).
- Issuer: The administrative address responsible for minting, token configuration, and asset governance.
- Jurisdiction: A geographic or regulatory region identifier (e.g., ISO country code) used by compliance modules to filter allowed or restricted counterparties.
- Keypair: A cryptographic public-private key pair (Ed25519) used to authenticate actions and sign transactions.
- KYC (Know Your Customer): The regulatory due diligence process verifying the identity and legal status of token holders and transaction counterparties.
- Ledger: The authoritative state of the Stellar blockchain, updated periodically (typically every 5 seconds) through the Stellar Consensus Protocol.
- Ledger Sequence: The monotonically increasing integer identifier assigned to each closed ledger block.
- Live Until Ledger: The ledger sequence up to which an allowance or authorization is active.
- Maximum Supply (Supply Cap): The strictly enforced ceiling on the total quantity of tokens that can ever exist for an asset.
- Memo: An optional 28-byte data field, hash, or integer attached to a Stellar transaction for invoice tracking or routing.
- Mint: The creation of new tokens by an authorized issuer or vault, increasing total supply.
- Net Asset Value (NAV): The evaluated per-unit monetary valuation of the collateral, fund, or real-world assets backing a token.
- Nonce: An incremental counter ensuring each transaction or approval can only be executed once, preventing replay attacks.
- Oracle: An off-chain data reporting system providing real-time pricing, benchmark rates, or state updates to smart contracts.
- Oracle Adapter: A contract adapting external market feeds into Soroban standard formats (e.g., SEP-40).
- Persistent Storage: On-chain Soroban storage retained indefinitely as long as its rent / TTL is periodically refreshed before expiration.
- Proposal: A formal governance action submitted for vote, containing targets, parameters, and executable actions.
- Provenance: Cryptographic proof certifying the origin, build environment, and source code commit of published packages and binaries.
- Quorum: The minimum total vote participation required for a governance proposal to be considered valid and eligible for finalization.
- Real World Asset (RWA): Tangible or financial assets existing off-chain (e.g., real estate, treasury bills, private credit, carbon credits) tokenized on-chain.
- Registry: The master on-chain directory mapping asset addresses, symbols, compliance modules, and issuer metadata.
- Resolution: The granularity time interval (in seconds) between sequential oracle updates.
- Root Invocation: The top-level function call in a transaction call tree from which sub-contract calls descend.
- ScVal (Soroban Value): The unified binary serialization format representing values (integers, symbols, addresses, maps, vectors) in Soroban.
- SEP (Stellar Ecosystem Proposal): Public architectural standards guiding integrations across the Stellar network.
- SEP-40: The standard interface specification for Soroban oracle and price feed contracts.
- SEP-41: The standard interface specification for fungible token smart contracts on Soroban.
- Soroban: The Rust-based, WASM smart contract execution environment integrated into the Stellar blockchain.
- Sponsored Transaction: A transaction pattern where an operator account covers fees and network reserves on behalf of an end-user.
- Stroop: The smallest atomic divisible unit of Stellar Lumens (XLM), equal to 0.0000001 XLM (10^-7).
- Temporary Storage: Low-cost Soroban storage intended for ephemeral data that automatically clears upon reaching its expiration ledger.
- Time-to-Live (TTL): The remaining number of ledgers before a contract instance or persistent storage key becomes inactive.
- Tokenization: The legal and technical process of representing real-world asset rights and claims as cryptographic tokens.
- Tranche: A segregated risk or yield division within a structured asset or debt portfolio.
- Vault: A smart contract managing pooled investor capital, collateral custody, and yield distribution according to calculated NAV.
- Veto: The emergency governance authority allowing an assigned guardian or admin to reject an unsafe proposal before execution.
- WASM (WebAssembly): The portable binary-code format compiled from Rust that Soroban executes deterministically in its runtime environment.