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This glossary defines the terms that appear most often in the Intention documentation. For longer explanations and design rationale, follow the cross-references into the architecture and trading sections.

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ADL — Auto-Deleveraging

The protocol-native mechanism by which open positions are forcibly closed to absorb losses that exceed the insurance fund’s capacity. Selection is computed deterministically from a combination of unrealized profit-and-loss and effective leverage. See ADL.

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BFT — Byzantine Fault Tolerant

A consensus protocol that remains safe and live in the presence of arbitrarily malicious participants, subject to a bound on the fraction of faulty stake. IntentionBFT is BFT under a 2f+12f+1 stake-weighted threshold.

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Byte determinism

The property that two honest nodes replaying the same finalized block against the same pre-state produce byte-identical post-state, events, and per-transaction outputs. The user-facing form is OTD. Enforced by sorted-container discipline, fixed-point arithmetic, and the Differential Test Harness.

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Canonical Sequencing Commitment (CSC)

The cryptographic commitment, made by the block proposer and certified by 2f+12f+1 validators, to the specific ordering of transactions within a block. The CSC is the consensus-layer hook that anchors OTD and PTAD. See IntentionBFT.

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Cross margin

A margin mode in which all positions in an account share a single pool of collateral. Profits on one position can offset losses on another, but a sufficiently large loss on any position can liquidate the entire account. See Margin modes.

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Funding rate

The periodic payment exchanged between long and short positions in a perpetual market to keep the contract price tethered to the underlying spot price. Funding is settled by the protocol on a fixed schedule. See Funding.

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Index price

The block’s canonical observation of the external spot market for an instrument’s underlying, delivered through the in-consensus price quorum. The index is the input to mark-price construction; it is not the price at which trades execute. See Index price.

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Intention Exchange

The flagship perpetual futures DEX built on the Intention L1, live at app.intention.xyz. Operates a full central limit order book, isolated and cross margin, protocol-native liquidations, and on-chain liquidity vaults. Intention Exchange does not implement its own matching engine or risk pipeline — it inherits both from the protocol below it via IntentionKernel and IntentionBFT. It is the first application to use the protocol’s guarantees in production; other financial workloads will follow on the same substrate.

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IntentionBFT

The consensus protocol of Intention. A Byzantine-fault-tolerant, partially synchronous, stake-weighted protocol from the HotStuff family, extended with canonical sequencing commitments, in-consensus price quorums, batch availability decoupling, and stake-weighted leader reputation. See IntentionBFT.

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IntentionKernel

The deterministic state-transition kernel of Intention — not a general-purpose virtual machine. A closed-world execution layer whose instruction set is the enumerated set of typed financial primitives (order, cancel, match, mark, liquidate, fund, settle, transfer). See IntentionKernel.

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Isolated margin

A margin mode in which each position has its own collateral allocation. A loss on the position cannot exceed its allocated collateral, and cannot drain other positions in the same account. See Margin modes.

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Liquidation

The forced closure of a position whose account equity has fallen below the maintenance margin requirement. Intention liquidates in tiers — order book, liquidation vault, insurance fund, and finally ADL. See Liquidations.

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Mark price

The protocol’s smoothed, manipulation-resistant settlement reference. Computed each block as the median of up to five candidate prices derived from the index, the on-chain book, and exponential-moving-average components. Drives unrealized P&L and liquidations. See Mark price.

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Open interest (OI)

The total notional of all open positions in a market, counted on one side. Each market has an OI cap; see OI limits.

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OTD — Order-Time Determinism

The protocol-native guarantee (G1) that any two honest nodes replaying the same finalized block produce byte-identical post-state, event stream, and per-transaction output. See OTD.

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PTA — Price-Transaction Atomicity

The protocol-native guarantee (G2) that prices used in settlement-sensitive operations are signed by the same 2f+12f+1 validator set, in the same BFT round, as the transactions that consume them. See PTA.

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PTAD — Per-Transaction Attribution Discipline

The protocol-native guarantee (G4) that every state change and every event produced during block execution is cryptographically bound to the specific user transaction that triggered it, even under batch matching. See PTAD.

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Reduce-only

An order modifier that allows the order to decrease an existing position but never to open or extend one. Used to safely manage exits without risking accidental position flips. See Reduce-only.

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RNS — Risk-Native Semantics

The protocol-native guarantee (G3) that liquidation, insurance fund accounting, auto-deleveraging, and funding settlement are protocol-native state machines executed atomically with matching, in the same block, under the same prices. See RNS.

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Self-trade prevention

A protocol-level rule that prevents an order from matching against another order from the same account, eliminating wash trading at the matching layer. See Self-trade prevention.

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Tick size

The smallest allowed price increment for orders in a given market. Each market also has a lot size that defines the smallest allowed quantity increment. See Markets and Precision.

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TWAP

Time-Weighted Average Price. As an order type, a strategy that splits a large order into many smaller child orders spread over time to reduce market impact. See TWAP.

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Vault

A protocol-managed pool of capital that supplies liquidity to the order book and absorbs liquidations. See Vaults.

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VES — Verifiable Execution Stream

Intention’s user-facing, protocol-level observable: a complete, byte-deterministic, cryptographically verifiable stream of block execution, exposed as a streaming RPC interface. The user-facing form of PTAD.