Glossary
The cross-rollup vocabulary.
The terms that come up across the architecture and features pages, defined in plain English.
- Atomic swap
- A token exchange that either completes fully for all parties or does not happen at all — no intermediate state where one side has paid and the other has not.
- Atomic swap group
- A set of swap legs across one or more rollups bound by a shared swap_group_id. Every leg resolves within the deadline window, or every leg becomes refundable — never a partial fill.
- Commit-reveal
- A two-phase scheme where a user first submits keccak(payload || secret) to hide their intent, then reveals the plaintext only after the commitment is on-chain — defeating mempool front-running.
- Resolution delay
- A mandatory minimum number of blocks (default 2) between reveal and final resolution. Because a flash loan cannot span two blocks, single-block flash-loan exploits are structurally impossible.
- Flash-loan resistance
- A security property produced by the resolution delay: an attacker cannot borrow, exploit, and repay inside one block because Tesseract resolution deliberately spans multiple blocks.
- Relayer
- An off-chain infrastructure operator that monitors chain events and submits coordination transactions. Relayers bond TESS in the RelayerRegistry and earn fees, but cannot authorise resolution — the contracts do that.
- Rollup
- An Ethereum Layer 2 that executes transactions off L1 and posts data or proofs back to Ethereum. Tesseract coordinates swaps across rollups such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and Polygon.
- Native asset
- The real, canonical token on a given chain — as opposed to a bridge-minted wrapped IOU. Tesseract users keep native assets on each rollup; nothing is wrapped.
- MEV
- Maximal Extractable Value — profit a block producer or searcher captures by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions. Tesseract's commit-reveal design removes the fillable intent MEV bots target.
- Circuit breaker
- A safety mechanism that automatically halts the protocol after 50 consecutive failed resolutions, giving operators time to investigate before any further state changes.