Glossary

Admin

An admin from an organisation is a user who assists the owner in managing the organisation by creating wallets, policies, etc.

APR

Annual Percentage Returns (APR) is the annual percentage rate that is earned by staking virtual assets.

Block ID

A unique identifier assigned to each block within the blockchain. A block contains a set of transactions and is chained together with other blocks to form the blockchain.

Claim

The action of redeeming the rewards or interest accrued on staking assets.

Cold wallet

The wallet where the keys are kept offline and you need to manually access those keys to sign a transaction. The keys are stored in a hardware device, such as Ledger or Trezor. This type of wallet is considered extremely secure as the keys do not get exposed to the internet. The Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs), say treasuries, who only secure assets may opt for the cold storage. Liminal uses the protocol-level or smart contract-based multisig technology combined with hardware wallets as signing devices, to provide a highly secure cold storage solution.

Custodian

A custodian is an entity that manages private keys, transaction approvals, user management, and other organisational operations. A custodian can be Liminal or a whitelabel owner, who provides either Wallet as a Service (WaaS) or managed custody solutions, or both. Custodians manage organisational settings and setups through Admin Panel.

Deposit wallet

A hot wallet used by an organisation, such as exchanges, to receive crypto funds from its customers. An organisation can generate thousands or millions of addresses (one or multiple addresses for each customer) within a deposit hot wallet. The process of moving funds from these hundreds or thousands of customer deposit wallet addresses to a destination wallet address is called consolidation.

EVM chains

EVM refers to Ethereum Virtual Machine. EVM-compatible chains are blockchain networks that adhere to the same set of standards and protocols as the Ethereum blockchain and can execute smart contracts on Ethereum. A few examples are—Avalanche, Polygon, and Fantom.

Exchange

Exchanges are applications where cryptocurrencies can be traded. For example, Binance, ZebPay, KuCoin, Uniswap, etc. They can be centralised exchanges (CEXs) or decentralised exchanges (DEXs).

Gas Station

This is a type of wallet designed to automatically distribute native coins to wallets with low native asset balance. This enables organisations to ensure that their wallets consistently hold the necessary amount of native assets for seamless transactions.

Hot wallet

The type of wallet where your keys are available online. The hot wallet transactions are signed automatically. These wallets are of two types—deposit and withdrawal wallets. Hot wallets are created and operated via APIs. Once created, you can view the wallet details in Liminal Vaults.

Initiator

A transaction initiator is any user (owner, admin, or a member) added to a wallet's team of initiators. Initiators are authorised to initiate transaction requests which are then approved by the wallet's team of signers.

Liminal Vaults

Liminal Vaults is a platform where users of an organisation can create, manage and transact with cold mobile and cold hardware wallets. These transactions include staking, DeFi, tokenisation, etc.

Member

A member from an organisation is a user who can perform actions like initiating or signing transactions of wallets they're associated with. However, they cannot change any organisation settings.

Organisation

An organisation is a workspace in Liminal Vaults, where a business, such as an exchange, can create user accounts, manage wallets, keys, and assets. The owner is the first user invited to the organisation. The owner can further invite admins and members to manage operations within the organisation. A business can create one or more organisations in Liminal Vaults.

Owner

An owner is a special role assigned to the first user invited to an organisation. They are responsible for setting up the organisation in Liminal Vaults, creating MPC wallets, inviting other users—admins and members to the organisation, and overseeing all operations. An organisation can only have one owner.

PoS

Proof of Stake (PoS) is a consensus mechanism used by blockchain networks to achieve distributed consensus. Unlike Proof of Work (PoW), which relies on computational power to validate transactions and create new blocks, PoS relies on validators who hold and lock up a certain amount of the blockchain's native cryptocurrency (referred to as staking).

Rent

A rent deducted by Solana accounts on the blockchain, which is a fee for storing data on the network. The rent is calculated based on the size of the account and is deducted periodically. If an account's balance falls below a certain threshold, the account may be considered inactive or removed.

Rewards

In staking, rewards are the interest amount earned by staking for a defined period. For example, if you stake 32 ETH at an APR of 4% for 1 year, then the staking rewards at the end of the year will amount to 1.28 ETH.

Self custody

When a business secures and controls its own keys, the type of custody provided by Liminal is called self custody. A self custody organisation manages its own users to initiate, approve, and sign transactions.

Signer

A transaction signer is any user (owner, admin, or a member) added to a wallet's team of signers. For a mobile wallet, a signer can sign a transaction through the Vaults mobile app. For a hardware wallet, a signer can sign a transaction through a hardware device, such as Ledger or Trezor. Depending on the wallet's configuration, the minimum number of signers out of the total signers are required to sign the transaction for complete approval.

Sprayer

An extension to Gas Station but functions as a separate wallet. It is specifically designed to automatically spray native coins to individual customer addresses within a deposit wallet, whenever they are low on minimum required native coins for transactions. This enables smooth consolidation of tokens within the deposit wallet before transferring them uninterrupted to the cold wallet. Organisations need to ensure that Gas Station contains enough native coins to send to the Sprayer. When a deposit wallet is created, a rule to fund Sprayer from the Gas Station is automatically configured for an organisation, eliminating the need to manually fund Sprayer.

Staking

Staking is like a fixed deposit in a bank where you can earn interest on your deposits. If a cryptocurrency you own allows staking, you can stake some of your holdings and earn rewards over time. In Liminal, organisations can stake funds available in their cold wallets for multiple supported blockchains and earn annual percentage rate (APR).

Team

A team is a group of users (owner, admins, members) who are assigned to a wallet to either initiate or sign transactions. You can create teams of transaction initiators and signers to initiate or sign transactions, respectively.

Travel Rule

Travel Rule is a regulatory compliance to enhance transparency and prevent fraud, money laundering, and terrorist funding in transactions. It mandates that based on the jurisdiction regulations, a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP), such as a cryptocurrency exchange, needs to collect and share certain information of the transaction sender and receiver above a certain threshold.

Unbonding period

The unbonding period is the duration when the staked tokens remain in a locked state after a staker chooses to unstake or withdraw them. During this period, the tokens cannot be traded or transferred.

Unstaking

This refers to the process of discontinuing staking and withdrawing the staked funds back to the account along with the accrued rewards. Unstaking time periods differ for different protocols, for example, on Ethereum it takes between 2 days to a few weeks, on Solana or Cardano it takes a few hours to a few days.

User

An individual from an organisation who signs up on the Liminal Vaults platform. A user can have any one of three following roles in an organisation—owner, admin, or member. The users, based on their roles, can perform various actions, such as initiating transactions, signing transactions, creating wallets and policies, etc.

VASP

Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) is an institution that exchanges, holds, safe-keeps, converts, or sells virtual assets. All VASPs need to comply under FATF for AML/CT KYC Rules. A few examples are—custodians, exchanges, OTC Desks, Bitcoin ATMs, hedge funds, and brokerage services trading cryptocurrencies for other individuals or corporates, mining pools.

Warm wallet

The wallet that provides a middle ground between hot and cold wallets. It is more secure than hot storage but more accessible than cold storage. It uses the Multi-Party Computation (MPC) technology, where a shard is stored on an internet-connected mobile device. The transactions are not automatically signed; instead, they require manual approvals through the Liminal Vaults mobile application.

Withdrawal wallet

A withdrawal wallet is a type of hot wallet that is used by an organisation to move their customer funds out of Liminal to external wallet addresses. Typically, an organisation generates a single address for a withdrawal wallet. These wallets are required to be whitelisted to send funds out.

UTXO

An unspent transaction output (UTXO) is the leftover cryptocurrency balance stored in the wallet after a transaction, which the user can spend in the future (as it is still "unspent"). A UTXO chain is simply a blockchain which uses the UTXO accounting method (such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin), as opposed to an account-based accounting method.