Glossary
Ante: Ante is the name of this protocol. It stands for "autonomous native testing environment."
Ante Pool: An Ante Pool is a smart contract that allows for staking and challenging. Each Ante Pool points to a corresponding Ante Test on-chain.
Ante Pool Factory: The Ante Pool Factory is a smart contract that programmatically generates (deploys) Ante Pools on-chain. The "automated" deployment of Ante Pools means that it's less likely any individual Ante Pool has a bug or flaw, which is important because there may be assets staked or challenged in the Ante Pool.
Ante Test: A smart contract that checks an invariant of an external protocol. Ante Tests are the building block of Ante, and each protocol that uses Ante needs to get an Ante Test written for their smart contracts. Note Ante Tests must conform to the
IAnteTest.solinterface in order to be compatible with Ante.Challenger: The participant in the Ante system that puts crypto into the Ante Pool opposite of stakers. Challenger stakes slowly pay decay rewards to stakers over time.
Decay Rewards: All challenger positions are drained of a slight amount of ETH each block, approximately 100 GWEI (100 * 1e9 WEI, or 100 * 1e-9 ETH) per block. This approximately comes out to be around 20% a year, assuming roughly 6000 blocks per day.
EVM: The Ethereum Virtual Machine, or the "distributed computer" that Ethereum smart contracts run on top of.
Gas: Computations on the EVM cost gas, determined by their computational complexity. All transactions that write to the EVM state need some gas cost and the initiator of such a transaction typically pays for the Gas in ETH.
Guarantee: See invariant.
Invariant: also referred to as a protocol invariant or, more simply, a "guarantee." An Invariant for an external protocol is a property that should always hold. For example, in Uniswap, it could be that x*y=k (the product of the token balances should increase, modulo withdrawals), and for a lending protocol, like Compound, it could be that the debt outstanding is less than or equal to the total collateral.
On-Chain: Referring to a smart contract that runs computations on the blockchain, rather than "off-chain" or on a local computing environment.
Verifier: In Ante, the verifier is a challenger (who has been challenging for the minimum time required to be a verifier, 12 blocks as of this writing), who then tries to call
checkTestPasses()on a particular Ante Test from the corresponding Ante Pool. A successful verifier will be able to claim an additional bounty on top of the rewards they receive from forfeited stakes from stakers.Verify: The action of checking, from an Ante Pool, if its corresponding Ante Test is still passing. (An Ante Test no longer passing indicates that a catastrophic failure has occurred.)
Smart Contract: A software program written to run on a blockchain; in our case we refer to Ethereum smart contracts running on the EVM.
Staker: A participant in an Ante Pool that is effectively deploying crypto to "back" or "support" the outcome that its corresponding Ante Test never fails. Stakers earn decay rewards taken non-custodially from the challengers in a particular Ante Pool, but in the case the corresponding Ante Test fails, forfeit all of their stake.
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