Reference

Protocol glossary

Canonical, plain-language definitions for terms used throughout the documentation.

Universes and REP

Universe: A Zoltar ledger and identity for universe-specific REP and application state. Universe 0 is the initialized root; later universes are descendants created through forks.
Child universe: A deterministic descendant that represents one valid answer to its parent's fork question. In a binary-market example, a Statoblast fork on its own question creates Invalid, Yes, and No children. If an unrelated fork interrupts that market, its children instead follow the unrelated categorical or scalar fork question's valid answers.
Question: A global Zoltar object that identifies a proposition, its end time, and its answer options.
Outcome: One possible answer to a question. Statoblast binary markets use Invalid, Yes, and No.
Invalid: The legitimate third outcome for ambiguous, malformed, or otherwise unanswerable market wording.
REP: Universe-specific reputation tokens used as reporting, dispute, and security capital.
Theoretical REP supply: Zoltar's per-universe REP supply figure, from which it derives the fork and non-decision thresholds. Burns reduce it, and each child universe starts from its parent's supply after the fork threshold burn plus the fork initiator's migration balance.
Fork threshold: The amount of parent-universe REP that a fork initiator supplies and burns to begin a fork, derived by getForkThresholdAttoRep from that universe's theoretical REP supply. See migration accounting.
Fork haircut: The part of the fork threshold that Zoltar burns without crediting to the initiator's migration balance: ⌊fork threshold ÷ forkBurnDivisor⌋, at most 20%. Contract comments call it the burn haircut. REP added to a migration balance after the fork starts is credited in full.
Migration balance: A parent-universe credit (migrationRepBalanceAttoRep) created when REP is burned or committed for a fork. The same credited amount can be minted independently in each valid child, while per-child accounting prevents an account from consuming more than that amount in any one child.
Child REP: REP minted for one child universe. Its ledger and economic value are separate from parent and sibling REP.

SecurityPools, shares, and vaults

Portfolio: A shared REP capital ledger and ETH settlement system backing questions admitted by its configured policy. Owners retain individual commitments and health settings; questions have separate outcome shares and settlement balances. A portfolio with one fixed question uses the same architecture as a portfolio admitting many questions.
SecurityPool: The portfolio-bound contract for one question in one universe. It exposes shares, local reporting and redemption; its portfolio modules hold capital and settlement cash.
Lineage: An origin SecurityPool and every child pool forked from it. Pools in one lineage share an origin ID and one outcome-share token contract.
Origin pool: A question pool first registered in a portfolio, before any child pool is prepared for its lineage.
Settlement collateral: The question’s backing in the portfolio settlement book. Complete sets and winning shares redeem their proportional value; holding fees reduce backing only above the configured floor.
Open interest: The exposure created by outstanding question claims. Portfolio settlement demand aggregates the obligations that healthy underwriting commitments must support.
Complete set: One matching unit each of Invalid, Yes, and No shares, minted against ETH and redeemable together while the pool is operational.
Outcome share: An ERC-1155 token representing one outcome claim in one universe-specific SecurityPool.
Vault: An owner’s capital account: its own REP principal, commitment and fee claims in the shared capital ledger. An auction winner may control a separate vault contract that owns such an account.
Underwriting commitment: An owner’s authorized amount of ETH obligations. Healthy commitments contribute to shared portfolio capacity and earn fees; losses from a distressed position stay with that owner.
Security multiplier: The portfolio’s fixed protocol backing multiplier, expressed in basis points. Owners can select an additional personal health target; the two settings have different purposes.
Vault health: Whether an owner’s total free and pledged principal covers its commitment at the protocol backing requirement and conservative REP price. See liquidations.
Health target: An owner-selected target of at least 100% relative to the protocol backing requirement. It constrains commitment changes and surplus withdrawals; falling below that personal buffer alone does not trigger liquidation.
Minting capacity: The healthy portfolio commitment available to support additional settlement demand. Purchases also require a current funded price and an eligible question.
Utilization: The fraction of shared capacity already supporting settlement demand. The portfolio’s configured annual holding-fee rate does not vary with utilization.
Fee reserve: Fees retained for underwriters rather than for outcome-share redemption. Accumulators credit eligible owners without visiting every question when an owner claims.
Holding fee: The configured linear charge on a question’s fee principal while its stream is eligible to run. It reduces share backing over time but stops before crossing the minimum backing floor. See fees.

Escalation Game

Escalation Game: The local Statoblast dispute mechanism in which REP-backed balances accumulate behind Invalid, Yes, and No.
Start bond: The minimum Escalation Game deposit: the larger of 1 REP and the universe's theoretical REP supply when the pool was deployed ÷ 10⁷. Origin-pool deployment requires it to be below the non-decision threshold; a game started with a bond at or above that threshold is clamped to one atto-REP below that threshold. A smaller deposit is accepted only when it fills an outcome exactly to that threshold. A child pool continuing a forked game keeps its parent's start bond.
Binding capital: The median of the three outcome balances that determines the Escalation Game's scheduled deadline.
Required support: The REP an outcome must hold to stay in contention, called attrition cost in the contracts (totalCostAttoRep). It is zero for the three-day activation delay, then rises from the start bond to the non-decision threshold over 49 days. The game's deadline is the moment it passes binding capital.
Non-decision threshold: The balance that two outcomes must each reach for the Escalation Game to enter non-decision: half of the universe's fork threshold, rounded up, read when the game opens and fixed for that game and any game carried from it.
Non-decision: The Escalation Game state in which two outcomes have each reached the non-decision threshold (NonDecisionState.Local). The game picks no winner, and anyone can fork the universe on the pool's own question.
Reward-eligible cap: One and a half times binding capital. Only the portion of winning Escalation Game deposits up to this cap earns a bonus; deposits beyond it return principal only. See the EscalationGame reference.
Escalation haircut: Two fifths of binding capital, burned at Escalation Game settlement instead of being paid to winners as a bonus, unless the pool's own fork already paid it through the fork haircut. The contracts call it the winner haircut (burnEscalationWinnerHaircut).

Forks and repair

SecurityPoolForker: The shared contract that prepares question children and their inherited reporting state after portfolio branch migration.
Migration window: The period in which parent REP can migrate to a child universe. Portfolio owners must record their branch choice before an earlier choice cutoff; shared branch processing then uses that recorded allocation.
Carried game: A child question’s continuation of an unresolved parent Escalation Game. Frozen history authenticates inherited claims; new wallet REP deposits use the continuation’s current rules.
Fork continuation: The preparation needed before a child question resumes an inherited unresolved reporting game. Purchases wait until the question and shared branch are ready.
Collateral Repair Auction: A uniform-price auction of a portfolio branch’s saleable REP for ETH to repair branch claims. Winning bids automatically own separately accounted capital positions. It does not select truth.

Liquidation

Target vault: The unhealthy vault whose underwriting commitment a liquidation reduces.
Receiver vault: The vault that accepts the transferred commitment and the REP award. It must stay healthy on its whole resulting commitment.
Operator: An account submitting permissionless maintenance transactions, such as a funded takeover of distressed commitment. A takeover receiver must authorize its own capital and satisfy the transaction bounds.

Prices

OpenOracle: An economically contestable price-reporting contract used by Statoblast for fresh REP-per-ETH prices (written REP/ETH elsewhere in these pages), not market outcomes.
Price coordinator: A question-facing adapter to the portfolio’s shared REP/ETH feed. It exposes current prices and requests funded OpenOracle reports; it does not queue vault operations.

Trading

Trading pool: The constant-product pair (TwoWayConstantProductPair, called the pair in the Trading reference) that trades one SecurityPool's Yes and No shares against each other. The Trading factory creates at most one per SecurityPool.
Trading router: The TwoWayConstantProductRouter contract that turns ETH into a position and a position back into ETH by combining SecurityPool complete-set calls with trading-pool swaps.
Long shares: The Yes or No shares a trader holds on the side they expect to win. Entering through the trading router also leaves the trader one Invalid share for each complete set it minted, fewer than the long shares received.
Insured exit: A trading-router exit that swaps some long shares for the opposite outcome, then redeems them with the trader's Invalid shares as complete sets for ETH.