A clear meaning for every term.

The token in the ArcBlock protocol. It is the unit the protocol meters and settles in, and the thing a participant locks as a bond when staking. The name has been read both as ArcBlock Token and as Advanced Blockchain Technology.

ABT Settlement is the use of ABT as the asset that moves after an obligation has been calculated.

AFS (Agentic File System) turns the files, services, and active work relevant to a task into an inspectable resource view. Instead of handing an agent an undifferentiated machine or a pile of APIs, it gives the task a world with names and boundaries.

A useful system can distinguish the person, service, or agent taking an action; the party it represents; and the permission for that action. Treating all three as one shared secret makes a later decision harder to explain.

Built for a non-deterministic actor rather than a caller that does the same thing every time. It is the first word in AFS, AOS, ARC and AUP because each answers the same question: what does a system owe an actor whose next move it cannot predict.

A framework for developers building agents. Start from the command line to create and run a project; use the framework documentation for the parts that need detail.

A single gateway for reaching several LLM providers, with credit and usage management in one place. Its work has been taken into ARC.

A place to build and run agents without writing the wiring by hand, including self-hosted models. Its work has been taken into ARC.

An astrology app that uses a large language model to write its readings. It began as an internal project built on ArcBlock's own platform, to show what the platform could carry.

Agentic Operating System. The portable layer holding operating-system semantics: identity, session, scheduling, the HTTP surface, and instance management.

ARC is the runtime for Blocklets. It gives a developer a place to run an application described as a Blocklet, instead of making the runtime, the application, and its resource connections one unexplained deployment.

A data space associated with a DID. Create a personal space, or connect an application with the permissions and data model its task requires.

The application-focused Layer 1 for identity, assets and agreements. ArcBlock Chain brings these operations into the protocol, with ABT as the public network’s native token.

Moves assets between the ArcBlock chain and other networks, operated by nodes that stand behind the transfers they relay.

ARC's mobile application surface. It gives supported ARC Blocklet experiences a coherent, app-like way to be used on a phone.

Create and manage a digital identity (DID) and its associated credentials in one app.

Collect the things that catch your attention and revisit them in collections.

AUP (Agentic UI Protocol) lets an application express what is shown and what actions are available. A runtime then renders the parts that fit its device capabilities, instead of treating one screen's pixels as the application itself.

The first widely used chain, and the one that showed an append-only ledger could be kept by parties who do not know each other. Its design choices, proof of work among them, are the baseline most later chains define themselves against.

A reader for a chain: look up a transaction, an address or a block without running a node yourself. It is the ordinary way a person checks a claim about what happened on chain.

A distributed ledger that links records cryptographically and uses shared validation and consensus rules to establish an accepted transaction history.

A Blocklet is ARC's deployable unit. It keeps an application's declared content, configuration, and runtime needs together, so the unit being run is easier to understand and manage.

Launched a Blocklet onto a server without configuring it by hand first. ARC handles that differently, so the launcher is no longer needed.

The server that hosted blocklets as subprocesses. ARC is where that work continues; the subprocess hosting model is not being carried forward.

Where a Blocklet was published, found and installed. ARC handles that differently, so the store is no longer needed.

One statement about a subject inside a credential: a date of birth, a role, a membership. Keeping them separate is what makes it possible to show one without showing the rest.

The command line as a first-class way in, not a fallback. It matters for agent work because a command and its output are both text, which makes each step something that can be recorded and repeated.

A Component Miner creates, improves, or maintains reusable Blocklets and software capabilities, usually as a human plus AI Workers.

How separate parties end up with the same ledger without one of them being in charge. Every chain picks a rule for this, and the choice decides what it costs to disagree.

Useful context is more than a prompt. It includes the documents, tools, and permitted actions that are relevant to the task. If those boundaries are vague, a capable model still has to guess what it may use.

A Contribution is a verifiable action, resource, artifact, or result that a project accepts as useful work.

A new version of Creator Studio is coming soon. Explore the earlier open-source work and documentation while we prepare what comes next.

Crowd Building is a production model in which people, AI Workers, and other contributors make a product by contributing work, not only capital.

An organization whose decision procedure is written as code on a ledger rather than held in a document someone administers. How autonomous one actually is depends on how much of it the code really covers.

An application whose important state does not sit only in one operator's database. What counts as decentralized varies a lot between projects, so the useful question is which part is checkable by someone outside.

Darc Factory is a proposed system that uses the DARC Protocol to coordinate independently owned computers for work such as coding, research and testing.

DARC is the protocol through which independently owned Arcs coordinate work, resources, tasks, verification, and contribution.

Not one property but a question asked per part: who can change this, who can withhold it, and who can check it afterwards. A system is usually decentralized in some of its parts and not others.

An approach where the identifier and the claims about it are held by the subject and checked by the verifier, instead of living inside one provider's account system. DID and verifiable credentials are the pieces that make it workable.

Letting one party act for another with a boundary attached: which actions, on whose behalf, until when. It is the piece that makes an agent acting for a person auditable rather than indistinguishable from them.

A Demand Contribution reduces uncertainty about whether a product should exist and what customers actually need.

In ARC, a device is a way of turning what is under an AFS directory into a surface for something else to see.

A DID is a digital identifier. It helps its holder and a verifier establish who controls an identity and who a claim relates to. It is not a wallet, and it does not replace application accounts, sign-in methods, or permission rules.

The part of the DID protocol an application uses to ask someone to sign in or present a credential, including alongside third-party accounts.

A DID document describes verification methods and services associated with a DID. W3C defines the shared data model; resolving a DID still requires support for its method. Applications decide which keys, purposes and issuers they accept.

An open-source library that turns a DID into a distinct icon, so an address a person cannot read at a glance still looks like itself. Our block explorer and DID Wallet both use it.

Domain management built on DID and verifiable credentials. One account can host and manage many domains at once, rather than configuring each one separately.

A data space associated with a DID. Create a personal space, or connect an application with the permissions and data model its task requires.

Create and manage a digital identity (DID) and its associated credentials in one app.

ArcBlock’s DID method, using the did:abt: namespace to identify accounts, assets and other objects. Resolution requires support for this method.

An application for documentation, discussions and feeds. DiscussKit is being improved as a standalone product; some of its capabilities are also part of ARC.

Packaging a program together with the filesystem it expects, so the same image runs the same way elsewhere. A Blocklet answers a nearby question but declares what it needs rather than shipping a copy of it.

Generates and maintains documentation alongside the code it describes, including multilingual versions. Its work has been taken into ARC; the standalone tool is no longer maintained.

Economic Composition means that when independently owned software is composed, ownership and settlement relationships can compose with it.

The chain that made programs, not just transfers, the thing a ledger records. Smart contracts as most people mean them come from here, and so does much of the tooling other chains reuse.

An SDK and toolchain for building chain applications without assembling the node, the data layer and the client separately. ArcBlock Chain is what that became.

A token whose units are interchangeable: one unit is as good as any other, so amounts can be added and split. The counterpart to an NFT, where each unit stands for one particular thing.

The metering unit for work a chain performs on a transaction's behalf, so an expensive computation cannot be submitted for free. Gas-free describes an arrangement where someone other than the sender covers that metering.

How a system decides to change itself, and who gets a say. Worth stating plainly for any protocol, because the rules for changing the rules are usually less decentralized than the rules themselves.

A query language where the caller states the shape of the data it wants and gets back that shape. It matters here because OCAP uses it to make chain data askable in one interface instead of one client per chain.

A way for one program to call another across a network with the message shapes declared up front. Compared with an ad-hoc HTTP endpoint, the declaration is what lets both sides be generated and checked rather than agreed by hand.

The record itself: an ordered list of entries that is appended to and not edited. A chain is one way to keep a ledger that several parties can check without trusting whoever holds it.

A large language model. Treated here as a non-deterministic actor to be given clear boundaries and checkable records, not as a component that returns the same answer every time.

Model Context Protocol: an open way for a model to reach tools and data through one declared interface instead of a bespoke integration each time. It matters here because it is the same problem AFS answers from the other side; what a task is allowed to see.

Stores and serves the images and files a Blocklet uses. Its work has been taken into ARC; the standalone Blocklet is no longer maintained.

Several agents working on one task, which turns questions that were internal into questions between parties: who is allowed to do what, and who is answerable for a result neither of them produced alone.

A token whose units are not interchangeable, so one of them can stand for one particular thing. On this site it has mostly been used for tickets, certificates and badges, cases where what matters is that a specific holder can show a specific item.

Where NFTs made with NFT Studio are listed and transferred, including listing by DID.

Creates and issues NFTs, and the surfaces for holders to use them.

The widely deployed way to let an application act on an account without holding its password. It answers delegation for accounts the way DID Connect answers it for identifiers you hold yourself.

A protocol for querying chain data through one interface rather than one client per chain. ArcBlock holds patents covering it.

An Operation Miner creates demand, distribution, sales, adoption, support, or market access for a project.

Builds and themes site pages without writing the layout by hand. Its work has been taken into ARC; the standalone Blocklet is no longer maintained.

Billing, subscriptions and checkout for a Blocklet, including promotions and delegated payment. Its work has been taken into ARC; the standalone Blocklet is no longer maintained.

Deciding who appends the next block by who has posted a bond, rather than by who burned the most computation. Misbehaviour is answered by reducing the bond, which is what slashing is for.

Deciding who appends the next block by requiring a computation that is expensive to do and cheap to check. The cost is the point: rewriting history means redoing all of it.

A Realm is an independently controlled digital domain with its own identity, state, resources, permissions, and agency.

Realm Computing is a computing model in which independently controlled Realms are first-class computing and economic actors.

Recursive Settlement is settlement that follows a composition and ownership graph through nested components and contributors.

A Resource Miner supplies independently controlled AI productive capacity through a Worker Pool.

Doing many transactions off the main ledger and writing back one entry that stands for all of them, with enough evidence that the batch can still be checked.

The thing that is running while your code runs: it holds the process, the resources it may touch, and the rules about both. Naming it separately is what lets an application be described without also describing a machine.

The library and tooling a platform ships so a developer does not have to write the protocol by hand. What it covers, and what it leaves to you, is a fair summary of what the platform actually takes responsibility for.

The position that a person should hold their own identifiers and credentials and decide each time what to disclose. It is a stance about who is in control, not a protocol; decentralized identity is how it gets built.

The other half of staking: the bond is reduced when the participant fails the rule it was posted against. Without it a stake is a deposit, not a commitment.

Every agent, app and process sees not the global world but a small world projected specifically for it. What is outside it is not "access denied", it does not exist.

A program the ledger runs and records the result of, so its behaviour can be checked afterwards by anyone reading the chain. Neither smart nor a contract; it is code with a public audit trail.

Locking an amount as a bond behind work a participant performs, so that breaking the rule they agreed to has a cost that the protocol can act on. The bond is what makes the promise checkable rather than merely stated.

On a ledger, a unit that a transaction can move and a rule can be written about. What one stands for is decided by the protocol that issues it, not by the word itself.

A piece of text as the model counts it, usually shorter than a word. It is the unit a context window is measured in, which is why the same document can fit one model and not another.

One signed change to the ledger. The signature is what ties the change to whoever was allowed to make it, which is why a transaction can be checked long after the fact by someone who was not there.

Treats the browser as a device you can operate live, rendering AUP right there in the browser.

A VCT is a project-defined record of recognized contribution or project rights. Its payload is a Verifiable Credential (VC).

A verifiable credential is a signed statement from an issuer about a subject. It gives a verifier something more specific to inspect than a screenshot or an assertion passed along without its source.

What the holder actually hands over: one or more credentials, signed by the holder for this occasion. The credential says what an issuer claimed; the presentation says who is showing it, to whom, now.

The thing that holds the keys, and increasingly the credentials, on the holder's side. Naming it after money is a historical accident: signing in and presenting a credential use the same keys as paying does.

Declare a .web/ folder anywhere in AFS, and the data and AUP under it get rendered server-side into a website.

Blocklet-side pieces for working with on-chain data and accounts. Its work has been taken into ARC; the standalone Blocklet is no longer maintained.

Generates site content and imagery from a described intent. Its work has been taken into ARC; the standalone tool is no longer maintained.

A Worker is an Arc operating productive capabilities on behalf of its controlling Realm.

A Worker Pool is a Realm-controlled collection of AI and compute resources exposed through a standard worker interface.