Glossary

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Account

A central Stellar data structure to hold balances, sign transactions, and issue assets. See the Accounts section to learn more.

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Account ID

The public key used to create an account. This key persists across different key assignments. It is represented in base32.

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Anchor

The on and off-ramps on the Stellar network that facilitate one-to-one conversion of off-chain representations to and from tokenized assets, for example, digital tokens representing bank deposits. Read more in the Anchors section.

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Application (app)

A software program designed for users to carry out a specific task (other than operating the computer itself).

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Asset

Fiat, physical, or other tokens of value that are tracked, held, or transferred by the Stellar distributed network. See the Assets section to learn more.

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Atomic Swap

A decentralized method of exchanging one asset for another without the need for a trusted third-party intermediary. Atomic swaps allow the interchange to either complete fully for both parties or not at all, hence the term “atomic,” meaning indivisible. If one party fails to fulfill the required conditions, the trade is automatically canceled and both parties retain their assets. Learn more in the default Liquidity on Stellar section or an Atomic Swap example contract.

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Balance

The amount of a given asset an account holds. Each asset has its own balance and these balances are stored in trustlines for every asset except XLM, which is held directly by the account.

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BalanceID

Parameter required when claiming a newly created entry via the Claim claimable balance operation. See ClaimableBalanceID.

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Base Fee

The fee you’re willing to pay per operation in a transaction. This differs from the Effective Base Fee which is the actual fee paid per operation for a transaction to make it to the ledger. When the network is in surge pricing mode, the effective base fee varies based on an auction mechanism. When it’s not, the effective base fee defaults to the network minimum currently at 100 stroops per operation. Learn more in our Fees section.

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Base Reserve

A unit of measurement used to calculate an account’s minimum balance. One base reserve is currently 0.5 XLM. Learn more in our Lumens section.

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Burn

Remove an asset from circulation, which can happen in two ways: 1) a holder sends the asset back to the issuing account 2) an issuer claws back a clawback-enabled asset from a holder’s account.

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Claim Predicate

A recursive data structure used to construct complex conditionals with different values of ClaimPredicateType.

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ClaimableBalanceID

A SHA-256 hash of the OperationID for claimable balances.

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Claimant

An object that holds both the destination account that can claim the ClaimableBalanceEntry and a ClaimPredicate that must evaluate to true for the claim to succeed.

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Clawback

An amount of asset from a trustline or claimable balance removed (clawed back) from a recipient’s balance sheet. Learn more in our Clawback guide.

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Composable Data Platform

An architecture for building custom Stellar data pipelines from raw ledger metadata. CDP uses tools such as Galexie to export ledger metadata to external storage, then lets downstream consumers use the Ingest SDK or other processors to transform that data into application-specific models, analytics, indexes, or streams. Learn more in our Ingest SDK tutorial and the Composable Data Platform announcement.

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Contract Account

An account that is implemented as a smart contract, allowing the contract to define custom authorization logic and on-chain policy enforcement before authorization succeeds instead of relying on built-in protocol features.

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Contract Token

Tokens created and managed through smart contracts. These assets are programmable and governed by on-chain logic instead of built-in protocol features.

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Core Advancement Proposals (CAPs)

Proposals of standards to improve the Stellar protocol. CAPs deal with changes to the core protocol of the Stellar network. Find a list of all draft, accepted, implemented, and rejected CAPs in GitHub.

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Create account operation

Makes a payment to a 0-balance public key (Stellar address), thereby creating the account. You must use this operation to initialize an account rather than a standard payment operation.

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Cross-Asset Payments

A payment that automatically handles the conversion of dissimilar assets.

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Custom Token

This term has been deprecated in favor of contract tokens.

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Decentralized Exchange

A distributed exchange that allows the trading and conversion of assets on the network. Learn more in our Liquidity on Stellar section.

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External Data Representation (XDR)

The type of encoding used for operations and data running on stellar-core.

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Federation

The Stellar federation protocol maps Stellar addresses to an email-like identifier that provides more information about a given user. It’s a way for Stellar client software to resolve email-like addresses such as name*yourdomain.com into G... account IDs. Federated addresses provide an easy way for users to share payment details by using a syntax that interoperates across different domains and providers. Read more in GitHub.

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Flags

Flags control access to an asset on the account level. Learn more about flags in our Controlling Access to an Asset section.

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Fuzzing

An automated test that rapidly stuffs massive amounts of randomized, malformed data into a system to reveal adverse or unexpected results that indicate vulnerabilities. Read more in the Fuzz Testing Tutorial.

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GitHub

An online repository for documents that can be accessed and shared among multiple users; host for the Stellar platform’s source code, documentation, and other open-source repos.

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Home Domain

A fully qualified domain name (FQDN) linked to a Stellar account, used to generate an on-chain link to a Stellar Info File, which holds off-chain metadata. See the Set Options operation. Can be up to 32 characters.

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Inflation

The inflation operation is deprecated because it wasn’t working as intended. Most users either ignored it or used it for personal gain, and the costs kept rising, so the network voted to disable it in Protocol 12 through CAP-26: Disable Inflation Mechanism. Read about the implementation here. Read the related blog here.

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JSON

A standardized human-readable and machine-readable format for the exchange of structured data.

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Keypair

A combined public and private key used to secure transactions. You can use any Stellar wallet, SDK, or the Stellar Lab to generate a valid keypair.

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Keystore

An encrypted store or file that serves as a repository of private keys, certificates, and public keys.

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Ledger

A representation of the state of the Stellar universe at a given point in time, shared across all network nodes. Learn more in the Ledgers section.

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LedgerKey

LedgerKey holds information to identify a specific ledgerEntry. It is a union that can be any one of the LedgerEntryTypes (ACCOUNT, TRUSTLINE, OFFER, DATA, CLAIMABLE_BALANCE, Liquidity Pool, Contract Data, Contract Code, Config Setting or TTL).

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Liability

A buying or selling obligation, required to satisfy (selling) or accommodate (buying) transactions.

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Lumen (XLM)

The native, built-in token on the Stellar network. Learn more about lumens in our Lumens section.

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Mainnet or Pubnet

The Stellar Public Network, aka mainnet, the main network used by applications in production. Read more in our Networks section.

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Master key

The private key used in initial account creation.

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Minimum balance

The smallest permissible balance in lumens for a Stellar account, currently 1 lumen. Learn more in our Lumens section.

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Network capacity

The maximum number of operations per ledger, as determined by validator vote. As of July 2026, the limit is 1,000 operations for the mainnet and 200 operations for the testnet; check current values on Stellar Lab’s Network Limits page.

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Number of subentries

The number of entries owned by an account, used to calculate the account’s minimum balance.

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Operation

An individual command that modifies the ledger. Learn more in our Operations and Transactions section.

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OperationID

A unique identifier for an operation, derived from the transaction source Account ID, the transaction sequence number, and the operation’s index within the transaction.

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Order

An offer to buy or sell an asset. Learn more in our Liquidity on Stellar: SDEX and Liquidity Pools section.

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Orderbook

A record of outstanding orders on the Stellar network. Learn more in our Liquidity on Stellar: SDEX and Liquidity Pools section.

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Passive Order

An order that does not execute against a marketable counter order with the same price; filled only if the prices are not equal.

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Passphrase

The Mainnet and Testnet each have their own unique passphrase, which are used to validate signatures on a given transaction. Learn more about network passphrases in the Networks section.

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Pathfinding

The process of determining the best path of a payment, evaluating the current orderbooks, and finding the series of conversions to achieve the best rate. It happens during Stellar Core’s market-order execution and in Horizon aggregation.

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Payment Channel

Allows two parties who frequently transact with one another to move the bulk of their activity off-chain, while still recording opening balances and final settlement on-chain.

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Precondition

Optional requirements you can add to control a transaction’s validity. See the Operation and Transaction Validity section for more information.

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Price

The ratio of the quote asset and the base asset in an order.

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Public Key

The public part of a keypair that identifies a Stellar account. The public key is public- it is visible on the ledger, anyone can look it up, and it is used when sending payments to the account, identifying the issuer of an asset, and verifying that a transaction is authorized.

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Secret (private) key

The private key is part of a keypair, which is associated with an account. Do not share your secret key with anyone.

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Sequence Number

Used to identify and verify the order of transactions with the source account. A transaction’s sequence number must always increase by one (unless minimum sequence number preconditions are set, or a bump sequence operation is used). SDKs and the Stellar Lab automatically increment the account’s sequence number by one when you build a transaction.

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Signer

Refers to the master key or to any other signing keys added later. A signer is defined as the pair: public key + weight. Signers can be set with the Set Options operation. See our Signatures and Multisig section for more information.

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Smart Contract

Self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into code, automatically enforceable without the need for intermediaries.

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Soroban

The smart contract platform on the Stellar network. The name “Soroban” comes from the Japanese abacus, which is a traditional counting tool used for mathematical calculations. The Soroban abacus is a lightweight instrument known for its efficiency and accuracy in performing arithmetic operations.

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Source Account

The account that originates a transaction. This account also provides the fee and sequence number for the transaction.

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SPEEDEX

Short for Scalable, Parallelizable, and Economically Efficient Distributed EXchange, SPEEDEX is a proposed fully on-chain decentralized exchange design that processes trades in batches at shared exchange rates. This approach makes trades parallelizable, eliminates internal arbitrage opportunities, and prevents certain risk-free front-running attacks. SPEEDEX has been prototyped for Stellar but is not currently deployed on the network. Learn more in the SPEEDEX research paper, SDF blog post, and CAP-44 configuration proposal.

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Starlight

An experimental layer 2 payment channel protocol for Stellar that allowed for bi-directional payment channels. The project is no longer maintained, and its repository has been archived since April 2024.

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Stellar

A decentralized, federated peer-to-peer network that allows people to send payments in any asset anywhere in the world instantaneously, and with minimal fees.

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Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP)

Provides a way to reach consensus without relying on a closed system to accurately record financial transactions. See our SCP section to learn more.

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Stellar Core

A replicated state machine that maintains a local copy of a cryptographic ledger and processes transactions against it, in consensus with a set of peers; also, the reference implementation for the peer-to-peer agent that manages the Stellar network.

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Stellar Decentralized Exchange (SDEX)

An always-on native marketplace for asset conversions. Pay what you want for something else, and trade when someone agrees on price. Or farm yield with deposits that help network liquidity. Learn more in our Liquidity on Stellar section.

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Stellar Development Foundation (SDF)

A non-profit organization founded to support the development and growth of the Stellar network.

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Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEPs)

Standards and protocols to allow the Stellar ecosystem to interoperate. Learn more in our SEPs section.

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Stellar RPC

A node that provides an interface for submitting transactions and reading data from the Stellar network.

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Stellar.toml

A formatted configuration file containing published information about a node and an organization. For more, see the Stellar Info File spec (SEP-1).

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Stroop

As cents are to dollars, stroops are to assets: the smallest unit of an asset, one ten-millionth.

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Testnet

The Stellar Test Network is maintained by the Stellar Development Foundation, which developers can use to test applications. Testnet is free to use and provides the same functionality as the main (public) network. Read more in our Networks.

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Threshold

The level of access for an operation. Also used to describe the ratio of validator nodes in a quorum set that must agree in order to reach consensus as part of the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Read more about operation thresholds in the Operations and Transactions section. Learn more about quorum set validators in our Stellar Consensus Protocol section.

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Time Bounds

An optional feature you can apply to a transaction to enforce a time limit on the transaction; either the transaction makes it to the ledger or times out (fails) depending on your time parameters. Read more about time bounds in our Operation and Transaction Validity section.

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Transaction

A group of 1 to 100 operations that modify the ledger state. Read more in the Operations and Transactions section.

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Transaction Envelope

A transaction plus its signature(s) is called a transaction envelope.

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Transaction Fee

Stellar requires a small fee for all transactions to prevent ledger spam and prioritize transactions during surge pricing. Learn more in our Lumens section.

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Trustline

An explicit opt-in for an account to hold a particular asset that tracks liabilities, the balance of the asset, and can also limit the amount of an asset that an account can hold. Learn more in our Accounts section.

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TTL (Time To Live)

A smart contract’s TTL is how many ledgers remain until the data entry is no longer live. Read more in the State Archival section.

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Type

The classification of data that dictates the kind of data that can be stored and how it can be manipulated within a smart contract.

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UNIX Timestamp

An integer representing a given date and time, as used on UNIX and Linux computers.

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Validator

A basic validator keeps track of the ledger and submits transactions for possible inclusion. It ensures reliable access to the network and sign-off on transactions. A full validator performs the functions of a basic validator, but also publishes a history archive covering the network’s complete history — snapshots of the ledger, including all network transactions and their results.

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Wallet

An interface that gives a user access to an account stored on the ledger; that access is controlled by the account’s secret key. The wallet allows users to store and manage their assets.

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XLM (lumens)

The native currency of the Stellar network.