Glossary

Terms are grouped by domain. Within each group they are alphabetical.

Solana concepts

• Epoch: Solana's billing and governance time unit: 432,000 slots at a 0.4s slot target, so roughly 2 days. The epoch is the marketplace's billing unit, and a lease spans 1 to 30 epochs.
• Fan-out: Sending the same transaction to multiple leaders in parallel to maximize landing probability.
• Landing rate: The fraction of submitted transactions that confirm on-chain within a deadline.
• Leader window: A consecutive run of 4 slots (about 1.6s) during which a single validator is the active TPU leader on Solana.
• Stake table: The validators' stake distribution at the start of an epoch, used by leaders to apply SWQoS.
• SWQoS: Stake-Weighted Quality of Service. The Solana leader's policy that prioritizes QUIC connections from peers it recognizes as staked validators. This is the bandwidth the marketplace lets validators rent out. See the methodology page for the measured effect.

TEE and signing

• Attestation: A signed document produced by the NSM that proves which code (by PCR measurement) is running inside the enclave. AWS KMS checks it before releasing key material, so only the approved enclave image can decrypt the validator identity key.
• CertificateVerify: The TLS 1.3 handshake message that must be signed with the client's private key. In 2QUIC, the TEE signs it on behalf of the validator, which is the only signature the system ever produces.
• EIF: Enclave Image File. The signed binary that runs inside the Nitro Enclave.
• Host-proxy: The service on the validator's EC2 host that terminates TLS, exposes the TEE's gRPC API to traders, verifies each marketplace JWT, enforces the per-lease handshake quota, and forwards approved signing requests to the enclave over vsock. It ships from the open-source staked-quic-connection-provider repo.
• Keyguard matcher: Firedancer's fd_keyguard_payload_matches_tls_cv check, compiled into the enclave. The enclave refuses to sign any payload that does not match a TLS 1.3 CertificateVerify shape (exactly 130, 146, or 162 bytes), so the identity key can never sign a vote or a transaction.
• Nitro Enclave: AWS's TEE technology: an isolated VM with no persistent storage and no operator access, attested by the NSM. It is where the validator identity key lives in plaintext, and nowhere else. See the security overview.
• NSM: Nitro Security Module. The hardware module inside Nitro that produces attestation documents.
• PCR: Platform Configuration Register. A cryptographic measurement of the enclave's loaded code, used by KMS to gate envelope decryption to the approved EIF.
• TEE: Trusted Execution Environment. In 2QUIC, an AWS Nitro Enclave.

Marketplace terms

• Lease: A trader's paid-for access to a validator's TEE for N epochs (1 to 30), in one of two modes. Booking and payment are covered in the booking guide.
• Lease modes: Exclusive (the default, every validator offers it): one trader holds the epoch range alone and gets the validator's full stake-weighted bandwidth. Shared (validator opt-in, separate price): up to the seat cap of co-tenants per epoch, each with a reduced per-seat handshake quota.
• Listing: A validator's public entry on the marketplace: region, price, probe uptime and latency, and the epoch availability calendar.
• Onboarding token: A one-time token minted by POST /v1/validators/onboarding-sessions. The web funnel embeds it in the prefilled validator-cli register command so the resulting validator is attributed to the operator's account. See validator onboarding.
• Payment memo: A unique 26-character ULID identifying one booking's payment. It names the Solana Pay transaction request (/v1/solana-pay/{memo}), rides in the transaction's SPL memo, and is what the settlement worker matches on-chain. Memos die when the 15-minute payment window expires.
• Payout wallet: The Solana address that receives the validator's 90% leg of each payment, directly inside the trader's own transaction. It defaults to the identity pubkey at registration and can be changed later with validator-cli set-payout-wallet (future bookings only).
• Platform fee: The marketplace's 10% take-rate (1000 bps). It is frozen onto each lease at booking and paid as the second transfer leg of the same atomic payment transaction.
• Probe: The marketplace service that exercises each live validator's TEE every 60 seconds with a real SignCertificateVerify call, measured from eu-central-1. Three consecutive failures raise an alert (the listing is not auto-delisted). Probe data feeds listings and the reputation score.
• Reputation score: A 0 to 100 score recomputed daily: 50% 30-day probe uptime, 30% signing latency (30-day p50), 20% trader ratings.
• Seat cap: max_concurrent_shared_leases, the maximum number of shared co-tenants a validator accepts per epoch. Set by the validator when enabling shared mode, minimum 1. The per-seat handshake quota is the full budget divided by this cap.