Glossary
Terms are alphabetical. Where a term has a colloquial name and a contract name, both appear.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| ACI | Contract interface descriptor. A JSON description of a contract's entrypoints, types and events, produced by the Sophia compiler. The SDK needs one to encode a call; the agent skill ships them under contracts/. It describes signatures only, never implementations. See Calling Contracts. |
| AE | The native coin of the æternity blockchain. Used for gas, for tipping, and as the base currency of every bonding curve. See AE & Gas. |
| AddressLink | The on-chain identity contract. It stores signed, revocable provider links from an address to an X handle, a Nostr key, a preferred .chain name, a bio and a website, plus a per-address nonce that makes every link message single-use. See AddressLink. |
| AENS | æternity Naming System. Human-readable .chain names that resolve to an address, built into the protocol rather than added as a contract. Names of 13 or more characters register instantly; shorter ones go to auction. See AENS. |
| aettos | The smallest unit of AE, 1e-18 AE, analogous to wei. Contract amounts are in aettos unless stated in AE. See Curve Parameters & Units. |
| AEX-9 | The æternity fungible-token standard, analogous to ERC-20. Community tokens and the ProtocolDAO token both conform to it. See AEX Standards and FungibleTokenFull (AEX-9). |
| Affiliation system | The four-level referral scheme that receives 0.5% of every buy and splits it up the invite chain at 0.300%, 0.125%, 0.050% and 0.025%. Accounting lives in AffiliationTreasury.aes. See The Affiliation System. |
| Allowance | An AEX-9 approval letting another account move a set number of your tokens. Required before selling, because the sale contract can only take your tokens if you have approved it. See FungibleTokenFull (AEX-9). |
| Bonding curve | A function mapping circulating supply to price. Superhero uses one exponential curve for every community token, so price is a deterministic function of supply with no order book. See Bonding Curves. |
| Buy curve / sell curve | The two branches of the pricing function. The sell curve sits 0.5% below the buy curve at every supply level, which is what guarantees the reserve can always redeem the full supply. See Where the Money Goes. |
| Chain name | An AENS .chain name resolved for your address and shown on your profile. A preferred name you link through AddressLink takes priority over the one the middleware resolves. See Chain Names (AENS). |
| Collection | A namespace in the community factory with its own naming rules: allowed_name_length and allowed_chars. Every community token is created inside one; Superhero's global collection is fetched from the factory API. See Collections & Naming Rules. |
| Community factory | CommunityFactory.aes. A single, statically deployed contract that holds the collection registry, deploys a community's five contracts in one transaction, and mints ProtocolDAO tokens on buys. See CommunityFactory. |
| Community management | CommunityManagement.aes. Per-community metadata, the moderator set, the muted-user set, and the minimum token threshold for write access. See CommunityManagement. |
| Community token | The AEX-9 token attached to a trend, hashtag or community. Minted on buy and burned on sell against the bonding curve. See Community Tokens. |
| DAO | The on-chain treasury and governance contract attached to each community token. It is both the owner and the beneficiary of that token's sale contract. See How DAOs Work. |
| DAOVote | DAOVote.aes. The contract deployed per vote that records positions, locks the tokens used to vote, and can be withdrawn from after close. See DAOVote. |
| Delegated posting | Publishing a post signed by the author but submitted and paid for by someone else, verified on-chain through post_without_tip_sig. See Delegated & Gasless Posting. |
| Delegation | In platform governance, assigning your voting power to another account so it votes on your behalf. Distinct from delegated posting. See Delegation. |
| DID | Decentralized identifier. The W3C standard SuperheroID follows, linking a wallet, chain names and an X handle into one verifiable, portable identity. See Identity and DIDs. |
| FATE VM | The virtual machine that executes æternity smart contracts, optimised for functional-language execution. Sophia compiles to FATE instructions. See Sophia & FATE. |
| Indexer | The off-chain service that subscribes to contract events and builds the queryable index behind api.superhero.com. It derives the feed, charts, market cap and trending scores; no contract reads any of them back. See Architecture Overview. |
| Invite link | A one-time, AE-funded link that registers the claimer into your affiliation chain. The secret is in the link, so share it directly and never log or commit it. See Invite Links. |
| Key-block | A mined æternity block. Used as the time unit for governance: a DAO vote runs for two weeks measured in key-blocks, not wall clock. See Quorum & Thresholds. |
| Market cap | Price multiplied by circulating supply, quoted in AE. The default sort on the trending list, so larger communities surface first. See Reading a Token Page. |
| Middleware | æternity's caching and reporting layer in front of the node, serving transaction history and other queries the node will not. Configured as MIDDLEWARE_URL. See Networks & Endpoints. |
| Minimum token threshold | The community token balance required for write access in a community, held in CommunityManagement.aes and changed only by a ChangeMinimumTokenThreshold DAO vote. Also the balance required to open a vote. See Moderators & Write Thresholds. |
| Moderator | An address in a community's moderator set, appointed and removed by AddModerator and DeleteModerator DAO votes. Moderators can mute and unmute user IDs; they cannot delete posts. See Moderators & Write Thresholds. |
| Muted user | A user ID in a community's mute set. Clients hide muted content within that community; the underlying post remains in contract state and is readable by anything that ignores the list. See Moderation. |
| Nostr | The protocol behind Superhero's own chat, over the relay wss://relay.superhero.chat. Separate from anything on-chain. See Chat. |
| Payout period | The accounting bucket AffiliationTreasury.aes accrues referral rewards into before they can be withdrawn. See The Affiliation System. |
| Poll | A platform-wide governance vote against the governance registry contract, distinct from a community DAO vote. Stake-weighted; the official result is the stake-weighted tally, not the raw address count. See Polls. |
| Price impact | How much your own trade moves the curve: the gap between the marginal price before and after. Large on a thin token, unavoidable by design. See Fees & Slippage. |
| Provider | A namespace in AddressLink (x, nostr, bio, site or prefaens) owned by the one account allowed to submit links into it. The user signs each link; the provider owner submits and pays for it. See AddressLink. |
| ProtocolDAO token | A platform-wide AEX-9 token minted to the buyer on every community-token buy, intended as the foundation for future protocol governance. The governance functionality is not yet implemented. See ProtocolDAO Token. |
| Quorum | The participation floor a DAO vote must clear to be executable: at least 10% of total token stake must vote. Separate from the 55% approval supermajority. See Quorum & Thresholds. |
| ReplaceableDAO | The interface a community-supplied DAO must implement to be installed by a ChangeDAO vote. Requires is_dao() = true so a treasury cannot be transferred to a non-DAO address. See Replaceable DAOs. |
| Reserve | The AE held by a token sale contract to redeem sellers. Grows by 0.995 of each buy's curve cost, which is exactly the sell-curve integral for that slice, so the full supply is always redeemable. See Where the Money Goes. |
| Sale address | The ct_... address of a token's bonding-curve sale contract, the contract that mints and burns tokens on the curve. The handle you use to buy, sell, look up a token, find its DAO, and join its chat room. See AffiliationBondingCurveTokenSale. |
| Slippage | The tolerance you allow between the quote you saw and the price you get. On a sell it is enforced on-chain as minimal_return_required; the transaction reverts rather than paying out below it. Defaults: 1% in the token trade card, 5% on the DEX, 3% in the agent CLI. See Fees & Slippage. |
| Sophia | æternity's functional smart-contract language. It is strongly typed, with restricted mutable state and no floating point. Every Superhero contract is written in it. See Sophia & FATE. |
| Sponsored name claim | One free .chain name per address, paid for by Superhero. The name must be longer than 12 characters excluding the suffix. Additional names are claimed in Superhero Wallet at your own cost. See Claim Your .chain Name. |
| Spread | The gap between the buy and sell curves: 1% in total, split 0.5% to the community DAO and 0.5% to the affiliation system. It is not billed as a separate fee; it is built into the two curves and collected entirely on the buy. See Where the Money Goes. |
| State channel | An æternity layer-2 mechanism for off-chain transactions with on-chain settlement guarantees. Part of why æternity was chosen; not used by the Superhero contracts themselves. See State Channels. |
| SuperheroID | Superhero's on-chain identity: your wallet address plus your names and linked accounts, recorded as AddressLink provider links and mappable onto the W3C DID model. See SuperheroID. |
| Tipping (v3) | Tipping.aes version 3, the content contract. Holds every post in a map keyed by tip_id, supports direct and delegated posting, and emits PostWithoutTipReceived. See Tipping (v3). |
| Token sale | AffiliationBondingCurveTokenSale.aes. The contract you trade against: it holds the reserve, executes buys and sells, and routes the DAO and affiliation shares. See AffiliationBondingCurveTokenSale. |
| Topic | A hashtag as the platform treats it: a feed, a page, and potentially a token and a DAO. Trends = hashtags = communities = tokens. See Hashtags & Topics. |
| Trending score | The momentum signal served per token by the API, and the default sort for the trending list. Computed off-chain by the indexer; a ranking aid, not a protocol quantity. See The Trending Score. |
| Trendminer | Superhero's analytics surface for trending tokens, charts and live market data, served from the /trends/* routes in the app, where creators tokenize trending ideas. See The Trending Score. |
| tx hash | A transaction identifier. Look it up in an explorer to confirm that an action happened, and include it in any bug report. See Explorers. |
| Vote subject | The type of a DAO proposal, which determines what executing it does: VotePayout, VotePayoutAmount, ChangeDAO, ChangeMinimumTokenThreshold, ChangeMetaInfo, AddModerator and DeleteModerator. See Proposals & Vote Subjects. |
| WAE | Wrapped AE. An AEX-9 token representing AE one-for-one, needed because DEX pools trade tokens rather than the native coin. Wrapping and unwrapping are contract calls. See Wrapped AE. |
| Write threshold | See Minimum token threshold. |
Related
- Core Concepts: the pages these terms come from, in the order they build on each other.
- Where the Money Goes: the single page that uses the most of this vocabulary at once.
- Deployed Addresses: the concrete
ct_...addresses behind the contract names above. - FAQ: the same terms in the words users actually use.
- æternity Documentation Hub (opens in a new tab): the canonical definitions for the chain-level terms.