Terminology

Bundle | Bundler | Deep Hash | Provenance | Provenance Layer | Proto-provenance layer | Gateways | Optimistic finalization | Provenance | Transaction | Transaction Receipt

Bundle

A set of transactions joined into a single Arweave transaction.

Bundler

A node on Irys that receives transactions, handles payment channels and produces bundles.

Deep Hash

A hash algorithm that takes a nested list of values as input and produces a 384 bit hash, where a change of any value or the structure will affect the hash.

Provenance

The history of data. It can describe where data came from, how it was created, and who has handled it. Data provenance provides transparency into the lifecycle of data and is critical for building trust in the data.

Gateways

Nodes that listen to both bundlers and the Arweave L1 with the purpose of aggregating and indexing transactions. This allows you to retrieve and lookup transactions from clusters of bundlers without maintaining your own index.

Optimistic finalization

An incentive mechanism used by Irys to provide instant upload times.

On Arweave, a block is considered confirmed after 50 block confirmations. Data is considered seeded after it is stored by a minimum number of miners. This can take up to 100 minutes.

When you post a transaction to Irys, you are given a signed receipt. At this point, we can optimistically consider the transaction final because there is a greater financial incentive for nodes to behave honestly than there is for malicious behavior.

Provenance

The issuing of signed receipts, including a timestamp accurate to the millisecond, that provide irrefutable proof of data provenance.

Provenance layer

A ledger of record for digital information that tracks the origins and modifications of data. Data on a provenance layer must be permanent, precise, and unconstrained.

Proto-provenance layer

Previous projects that have provided degrees of provenance, but have fundamentally failed to be provenance layers. They fail to fulfill the Provenance Trilemma, by either not being permanent, precise or unconstrained.

Provenance Trilemma

A representation of the tradeoffs proto-provenance layers have had to make in the past. It describes the tradeoffs between data being permanent, precise, and unconstrained.

Transaction

A single item sent to a specific address, usually contains a data payload.

Transaction Receipt

A proof that an Iyrs transaction gets on to Arweave by an expected block. The transaction receipt format is.