Glossary - Fade

Parties

Term	Meaning
App, integrator	Whoever signs `open_wager`: a program over CPI, a server or a wallet. Identified by the signing address alone. Its on-chain record is created by its first wager.
Operator	An app that holds its users’ funds and stakes from them. It names itself beneficiary and credits its users.
User	The person the payout is for. Sees the app, not Fade.
Liquidity provider (LP)	Anyone who deposits USDC into the pool and takes the other side of every wager it accepts.
Cranker, keeper	Anyone who sends a permissionless transaction that moves the protocol forward (`request_randomness`, `settle_wager`, `expire_wager`, `strike_epoch`, `claim_*`) and is paid a prepaid, flat fee for it. A keeper is a cranker that runs continuously.
Beneficiary	The USDC account a payout is sent to. Named at open, never changeable.
Council, guardian	Governance. The council can upgrade the program and change parameters; the guardian can only tighten (set pause flags). See Security model.

Wagers and paytables

Term	Meaning
Wager	One payout: a stake, a paytable and the account that holds both, plus the outcome once drawn.
Paytable	The list of outcomes as `(p, m)` pairs, up to 32. An argument of `open_wager`, copied into the wager before the draw.
Bucket	One row of a paytable. `p` is a `u64` probability in billionths; all `p` sum to exactly 1 000 000 000. `m` is a `u64` multiplier in basis points; 10 000 is 1×.
Edge, declared edge	What the house keeps in expectation, in bps: `10 000 − ceil(Σ p·m / 1e9)`.
Pool edge	The part of the edge the pool earns: `declared edge − app fee − protocol fee`. The per-wager cap is computed on it.
Edge floor	The admission rule `declared edge ≥ 100 (LP floor) + 20 (protocol fee) + app fee`. Refused with `EdgeFloor` otherwise.
M_CEILING	The largest multiplier any bucket may carry: 10 000×.

Money and risk

Term	Meaning
Stake	What is put in, in USDC base units (6 decimals).
Pool credit	What reaches the pool at open: `stake − protocol fee − app fee`.
Payout max	`stake × max(m) / 10 000`: the largest payout the paytable can produce.
Liability	The pool’s worst-case additional outflow: `payout_max − pool_credit`. Reserved at open, released at settlement or expiry.
Assets	`total_assets`: the pool’s own ledger of what it owns. Never read from a token balance.
Free balance	`assets − reserved liability − open pool credits`.
Per-wager cap	`min(0.5 × pool_edge × free balance, 150 bps × assets)`, applied to the liability. Above it, the wager is refused at open.
App ceiling	The most one app may have at risk at once: 20 % of assets, the new wager included.
Utilisation	`(reserved liability + open pool credits) ÷ assets`. New wagers are refused above 70 %.
κ (kappa)	Hard ceiling on reserved liability: 80 % of assets.
Breaker	An automatic stop on new wagers: utilisation above 70 %, or a fall of 15 % or more in the share price over 24 hours. Neither can block a settlement, a strike, a claim or a withdrawal request.
Turnover	Volume wagered over a period divided by the pool’s time-weighted assets over that period.

The pool

Term	Meaning
Share	A standard, transferable SPL token (9 decimals) representing a claim on the pool. Minted and burned only at a strike.
NAV, share price	Assets over shares, with a fixed virtual offset that defeats first-depositor manipulation.
Epoch	A batch of deposit and withdrawal requests that clears at one price. The first request opens one; it closes at the next multiple of the epoch length (10 minutes by default, 120 seconds on devnet). Unrelated to a Solana epoch.
Strike	The permissionless transaction that prices an epoch and processes its requests, once the epoch has closed and every wager opened before the close has resolved.
Claim	The permissionless transaction that delivers a struck request: shares to a depositor, USDC to a withdrawer, the request’s rent to its owner.
Strike fund	SOL held by the pool’s `Queue` account that pays the striker. Refilled by requests while below its target.

Randomness and settlement

Term	Meaning
VRF	Verifiable random function: an oracle output that comes with a proof it was produced, not chosen.
ORAO	The VRF provider Fade uses.
Request after entropy	Fade’s rule that the randomness is requested only after the open, with a seed built on a block hash that did not exist at open.
s, h	The first slot present in `SlotHashes` after the open slot, and its hash.
T_SETTLE	150 slots, about a minute: how long Fade waits for randomness. After it, an unfulfilled wager can be expired. It is never a deadline to settle a fulfilled wager.
Forfeiture	What expiry does: the pool keeps the pool credit.
Crank fee	250 000 lamports prepaid at open: 50 000 to whoever requests the randomness, 200 000 to whoever settles or expires.
PayoutPending	The state of a wager whose beneficiary could not receive at settlement. The payout waits in an escrow until `claim_payout` delivers it.
Direct path	A wager with its own draw. What the program runs today.
Shared beacon	A design for small stakes in which one draw serves a round of wagers. See Shared beacon.

Solana terms

Term	Meaning
CPI	Cross-program invocation: one program calling another.
PDA	Program-derived address: an address derived from a program id and seeds that only that program can sign for.
Slot	Solana’s unit of time, a few hundred milliseconds. Fade specifies chain-timing bounds in slots, so they do not drift as block times fall.
SlotHashes	A sysvar holding the hashes of recent slots.
bps	Basis points. 100 bps = 1 %.
Legacy SPL token	The original token program. Fade accepts legacy SPL USDC only; Token-2022 is rejected.

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