Glossary

Canonical terms used throughout this docs set.

A

ant-client — Direct Rust and CLI interface to the network via ant-core and the ant binary.

ant-core — Headless Rust library used by ant for direct network operations and local devnet helpers.

ant-keygen — ML-DSA-65 release-signing utility.

ant-protocol — Shared wire protocol crate used by ant-core and ant-node for chunk messages, payment proofs, and devnet manifests.

ant-sdk — Daemon-based developer interface built around antd, REST/gRPC APIs, and language SDKs.

antd — Local daemon that exposes REST on http://localhost:8082 and gRPC on localhost:50051 by default.

Autonomi Network Token (ANT) — Token used for storage payments.

Arbitrum — EVM network family used by payment tooling and CLI network selection.

Autonomi — The network these repos target for decentralized storage and retrieval.

Autonomi Network — The peer-to-peer network reached through antd, ant-core, ant, and ant-node.

B

BLAKE3 — Cryptographic hash used for content addresses and for self-encryption chunk hashing.

C

ChaCha20-Poly1305 — Authenticated encryption primitive used in self-encryption.

chunk — Low-level stored unit of encrypted content.

close group — The set of nodes closest to a target address in XOR space.

content addressing — Deriving an address from content rather than from a mutable location.

D

DataMap — Retrieval metadata that ties uploaded content back to its encrypted chunks.

E

external signer — Wallet or signing flow that submits upload-payment transactions without giving antd or ant-core direct custody of the private key.

H

HKDF — Key-derivation primitive exposed by saorsa-pqc.

K

Kademlia DHT — The distributed-hash-table model used for routing and lookup.

L

local trust scoring — Local trust and response-rate style scoring rather than a network-wide shared reputation feed.

M

Merkle batch payment — Batch-payment mode used for larger chunk sets.

ML-DSA-65 — Post-quantum signature algorithm highlighted by the current transport and signing repos.

ML-KEM-768 — Post-quantum key-encapsulation algorithm highlighted by the current transport docs.

N

NAT traversal — Peer-observed address discovery, coordinator hints, hole punching, and optional UPnP-assisted address mapping used to keep peers reachable across NAT boundaries. Relay-assisted fallback handles cases where direct traversal still fails.

P

pay-once — Storage payment model where you pay when you upload and do not pay ongoing storage fees.

post-quantum cryptography — Cryptographic approach used here for transport key exchange, transport identity, and release signing. Content self-encryption remains a separate BLAKE3 plus ChaCha20-Poly1305 layer.

Q

QUIC — UDP-based transport protocol used for peer connections, NAT traversal coordination, and relay-assisted fallback.

S

self-encryption — Client-side content processing that returns a DataMap plus encrypted chunks.

X

XOR distance — Distance metric used for peer and data proximity in Kademlia-style routing.