Terminology
A glossary of terms used consistently throughout PolicyVault's documentation.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Agent / delegate | A key the owner authorizes to spend from a vault, bounded by covenant-enforced policy. See Agent/Delegate. |
| Allowlist (destination allowlist) | A cryptographically committed set of recipients an agent may pay. See Destination allowlist. |
| Approval threshold | The amount above which additional approver signatures are required. See Approval threshold. |
| Covenant | A constrained spending condition compiled in SilverScript that Kaspa L1 consensus evaluates directly against a transaction — the actual security boundary. See Covenant enforcement. |
| DAA score | Kaspa's difficulty-adjustment-algorithm score — the consensus time primitive PolicyVault's periodic budgets and time-locks use, instead of any client-supplied clock. |
| External approver | A wallet that may co-sign a qualifying request; cannot spend and cannot act as the owner. See External approver. |
| Fee reserve | A covenant-tracked balance, separate from principal, that pays a vault's own network fees. See Fee reserve. |
| Idempotency key | A client-supplied key that makes a retried mutating call safe — a genuine retry replays the original result rather than duplicating the action. |
| Intent manifest | A deterministic, structured description of exactly what a proposed transaction does, independently re-derivable and checkable before signing. See Local intent verification. |
| KAS / sompi | KAS is Kaspa's base unit for display; sompi is the integer subunit all consensus and accounting values are actually expressed in (never a floating-point number). |
| Machine identity | A scoped credential a wallet session creates for an automated caller (an AI agent or service). See Machine identities and capabilities. |
| Owner | The wallet that creates a vault and holds final, unconstrained authority over it. See Owner. |
| Per-transaction limit | The maximum a single spend transaction may move. See Per-transaction limit. |
| Periodic budget | A cumulative spending cap over a recurring, consensus-time-tracked window. See Periodic budget. |
| Recovery (owner recovery) | A terminal, owner-signed operation to withdraw a vault's funds entirely. See Owner recovery. |
| Reconciliation | The process of resolving a request's true outcome against actual, proven chain state rather than trusting a submission's apparent result. |
| Scope | A narrowing permission on a machine credential — restricts which API operations it may attempt; never widens what tenancy already allows. |
| Signer | An external component (a wallet, hardware device, or offline process) that holds keys and produces signatures. PolicyVault never holds key material itself. See What wallets and signers do. |
| Successor state | The exact, well-defined covenant state that results from a given operation — derived deterministically, never chosen freely. |
| Tenancy | The hosted-application-only layer deciding which wallet may see or edit which hosted object — strictly separate from covenant authority. See Tenant isolation. |
| Universal Signer Interface (USI) | PolicyVault's generic signer contract, allowing any compliant wallet/device/process to act as a signer without funds-critical code branching on which one it is. |
| Vault | One on-chain covenant instance holding funds under a specific, exact policy. See Vault. |
See also: Core Concepts for the fuller explanation behind each term.