Glossary

The coin and blocks

XMOR — Morana's coin.

Atom — one hundred-millionth of an XMOR. Every amount in the network rules is a whole number of atoms.

Halving — the block reward halves every 2,100,000 blocks.

Era — the span between halvings: 2,100,000 blocks, about four years.

Epoch — 10,080 blocks, or about a week. Relay payouts and updates to swarm membership are organized by epoch.

Maturity — the 100 blocks after which a block reward can be spent.

KawPow — the GPU mining algorithm.

LWMA — the rule by which the network retargets difficulty over the last 60 blocks.

PPLNS — the pool's payout scheme: the reward is split by the shares miners sent over a recent window, not only at the moment a block is found.

Names

MORID — an on-chain name that belongs to its owner's key.

Commit-reveal — name registration in two steps: first a hidden commitment, then, no sooner than 6 blocks later, the name itself. That way nobody can snatch the request.

Dutch auction — a sale where the price starts high and comes down until someone buys. Short names and names that were not renewed are released this way.

Grace period — the 30 days after a name's term ends, when it still belongs to its owner and can be renewed.

Relays and the messenger

Relay — a message-delivery server. It holds encrypted envelopes until the recipient collects them.

Swarm — all of the network's relays together.

Mailbox — a message-delivery address in the swarm. First contact uses a mailbox derived from the identity key. Ongoing conversations use separate pair or group mailboxes that change with each epoch.

Stake — coins a relay operator locks when registering. The network calculates the amount.

Income cap — the most a single relay receives in an epoch. The rest goes to miners.

Heartbeat — an on-chain record in which a relay signals that it is alive. Without it, a relay drops out of the payout queue.

Morana — the messenger's first profile: messaging, wallet and name.

Shadow — the messenger's second profile, for messaging only: its own key, no wallet and no name, always in the network's most private mode.

Privacy and keys

Sapling — the private-transfer scheme from Zcash.

Public address (T) — an address whose transfers are visible on the blockchain: address, amount, time.

Private address (Z) — a Sapling address: the amount and the parties are hidden.

Unified address — one address that holds a private receiver and, optionally, a public one.

Turnstile — the rule that nothing can be withdrawn from the private pool beyond what went into it.

Emergency switch — the ability of a new node version to close private transfers from a given block, leaving public transfers untouched.

Gateway — a server through which apps read the chain without downloading all of it. The app verifies the returned data, but the gateway can withhold a response or show an outdated chain.

Recovery phrase — 24 words used to derive the main wallet, name, messenger and relay-owner keys. Shadow has its own phrase by default.

.morbak — an encrypted backup file containing history and sync state, but no recovery phrase or private keys. Import it after restoring the same wallet with its phrase.

Stress testing — the stage before mainnet: people deliberately try to break the network, and everything found is fixed before launch.

Exact numbers are in the technical canon.