Skip to content

Glossary

A

  • Altius L1: Altius's institutional EVM Layer-1 — a Reth-based EVM execution stack with a fast BFT consensus and an operator control plane.
  • Altius HPEC (High-Performance Execution Coprocessor): A specialized, non-EVM execution layer that runs high-throughput, latency-sensitive workloads off-chain and settles verified results to Altius L1.
  • Administration API: A dedicated, access-controlled interface for operating an Altius L1 node, separate from the public JSON-RPC surface.
  • Audit logging: Recording of privileged and administrative actions for compliance and forensics.

B

  • BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerant): A consensus property that preserves safety and liveness even when a bounded fraction of validators are faulty or malicious.
  • Batch settlement: Periodically committing a batch of HPEC's off-chain results to Altius L1 as on-chain state commitments.

C

  • commonware: The framework providing Altius L1's fast, fixed-interval BFT consensus.
  • Control plane: The operator-facing capabilities layered onto Altius L1 — fee tokens, governance, validator lifecycle, RBAC, and audit logging.

D

  • Dual-state model: HPEC's design of a fast off-chain working state anchored to authoritative custody and settlement state on Altius L1.

E

  • Engine API: The standard interface (newPayload / forkchoiceUpdated) over which a chain's execution and consensus layers communicate.
  • EVM compatibility (Prague): Support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine at the Prague upgrade level, so standard contracts, ABIs, tooling, and JSON-RPC work unchanged.

F

  • Fee token: An operator-approved token in which network fees can be denominated and settled; Altius L1 supports configurable, multi-token fees.
  • Forced exit: A user-protection path that lets users recover assets directly from L1 contracts if HPEC becomes unavailable.

I

  • IPC transport: The inter-process channel (a Unix domain socket today) over which an execution client streams state changes to the SSMT engine.

L

  • L1 (Layer-1): The base settlement chain. Within the platform, Altius L1 is the L1 to which HPEC settles.

M

  • MDBX: A fast embedded key-value database used by SSMT as its on-disk store for trie data.

N

  • Nibble partitioning: Routing trie keys to SSMT worker threads by the first 4-bit nibble of the key; 16 nibbles are distributed across up to 16 worker threads.

R

  • RBAC (Role-Based Access Control): Governs which roles may perform privileged administrative actions on the network.
  • Reth: The modern Rust Ethereum execution-client stack that Altius L1's execution layer is built on.

S

  • Settlement bridge: The set of L1 contracts (custody vault, state-commitment bridge, settlement verifier, forced-exit module) that anchor HPEC's off-chain execution on-chain.
  • Sparse trie: A transient, partially-materialized trie holding only the nodes a block touches, enabling incremental state-root computation that reuses unchanged subtree hashes.
  • SSMT (Scalable State Merkle Trie): Altius Labs' parallel engine that computes the Ethereum state root off the execution client's critical path.
  • State root: The single hash committing to the entire account/storage state, recorded in each block header.

V

  • Validator lifecycle: On-chain management of the validator set — onboarding, rotation, and removal — rather than a set fixed at genesis.