Stake pool operators glossary

ADA: The name of our currency, named in honor of Ada Lovelace.

ADA holder: The person owning any amount of ada.

Cardano CLI: The command line interface that allows you to interact with the Cardano node.

Cardano node: A participant on the Cardano blockchain network, continuously making, sending, receiving, and validating blocks. Each Cardano node is responsible to make sure that all the rules of the protocol are followed.

Consensus: A way for a decentralized system to reach a consistent view of shared collections of data. Cardano uses the Ouroboros consensus algorithm, which is an algorithm based on proof of stake.

Delegate: Designating a stake pool to act on your behalf to perform the slot leader duties when elected by the protocol. 

Genesis Block: The very first block in a blockchain.

Ouroboros: Cardano’s proof of stake algorithm. 

Proof of Stake: A consensus algorithm where ada holders are elected at random,  proportionally to their stake, to validate the transactions that are to be included in each new block. 

Proof of Work: A consensus model where a publishing node wins the right to publish the next block by expending time, energy, and computational cycles to solve a hard-to-solve, but an easy-to-verify problem.

Slot leader: A node which was elected to have a right to create a block in the current slot. 

Stake: In a proof of stake protocol, participants are issued a stake equivalent to the number of coins they own. The stake is then used to allow participation in the protocol.

Stake pool: Stake pools are the trusted block creators in the genesis-praos system. A pool is declared on the network explicitly by its owners and contains, metadata and cryptographic material. Stake pools have no stake power on their own, but participants in the network delegate their stake to a pool for running the operation.

Stake pool operator: The person responsible for the operations of a stake pool.

Testnet: An experimental blockchain, with the same technology, software, and functionalities intended to use in the mainnet. The only difference is that the tokens used in a testnet do not possess any real value outside of the testnet environment.

Trusted peer:  Other trusted nodes in the network.