Glossary
- Consensus: A state of agreement on shared facts or data on-ledger.
- Distributed ledger technology (DLT): Consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data that use independent computers (referred to as nodes) to record, share, and synchronize transactions in their respective electronic ledgers (instead of keeping data centralized as in a traditional ledger).1
- Digital public infrastructure: Digital solutions and systems that enable society-wide functions and access to modern necessities like data exchange and sharing, digital forms of ID and identity verification, financial transactions, and information systems—similar to how physical infrastructure facilitates access to electricity, water, and transportation.
- Flows: The interactions that must occur between parties to achieve consensus to satisfy some business requirement.
- Hash, or hashed: Data being added to a distributed ledger is “hashed,” which means a cryptographic hash function is applied to the data and computes an individualized digital fingerprint for the data. Because the hash would be different if any of the underlying data were changed, it provides security from anyone attempting to tamper with it.2
- Notaries: A notary in Corda is a network service that provides uniqueness consensus by attesting that, for a given transaction, it has not already authorized other transactions that consume any of the proposed transactions’ input states (i.e., preventing “double spends”). There are two types of notaries in Corda: validating and nonvalidating.
- On-ledger/off-ledger: On-ledger refers to recorded transactions or actions. For example, if a record is “hashed” to the system, it is on-ledger. Off-ledger refers to activities or actions (including transactions or records issued) outside of a DLT system.
- Open-data architecture: Software design method that is based on specifications that are publicly available, which lowers the barrier for modification and data exchange between applications.
- Open-source software: Software developed and maintained via open collaboration and made available, typically at no cost, for anyone to use, examine, alter, and redistribute however they like. Software for public benefit should be open source by default.3
- Proof of concept (POC): Prototype or sample implementation that’s used to demonstrate the feasibility or potential value of a proposed solution or concept.4
- Transactions: Actions that represent a change in the ledger status. These actions can record changes in several formats, including financial, informational, and system transactions.
Citations
- Blockchain & Distributed Ledger Technology (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018), source.
- Roger Lee, “What is Distributed Ledger Technology?” National Law Review 12, no. 320 (November 16, 2022), source.
- Mark Lerner, Allison Price, Hana Schank, and Ben Gregori, Building and Reusing Open Source Tools for Government (Washington, DC: New America, July 2020), source.
- “What is Proof of Concept (POC) in Software Development?” Ralabs (blog), January 30, 2023, source.