Glossary and Terminology Guide
For an introduction to the concepts and terminology behind state channels, please see the original paper.
State Deposit
Any kind of blockchain state controlled directly by a state channel. This could be an ETH balance, ownership of an ERC20 token, control over an ENS name registration, or any other kind of state.
State Deposit Holder
The on-chain multisignature wallet smart contract that is the "owner" of a given state deposit
Counterfactual Instantiation
The process by which parties in a state channel agree to be bound by the terms of some off-chain contract
Counterfactual Address
An identifier of a counterfactually instantiated contract, which can be deterministically computed from the code and the channel in which the contract is instantiated
Commitment
A signed transaction (piece of data) that allows the owner to perform a certain action
Action
A type of commitment; an action specifies a subset of transactions from the set of all possible transactions conditional transfer: the action of transferring part of the state deposit to a given address if a certain condition is true.
NOTE: Section 6 of the paper specifies a concrete implementation that differs in certain respects from the protocol described here. The reason for this divergence is explained later.
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