Divi Glossary

1Coins and amounts

DIVI

The coin of the Divi network. Written in capitals when it means the coin, and as Divi when it means the project or the network. One DIVI can be split into 100,000,000 pieces (see duff).

duff

The smallest unit of DIVI: one hundred-millionth of a coin, the same idea as a satoshi in Bitcoin. Wallets show DIVI with up to eight decimals; the node counts in duffs underneath. Fees are set in duffs per kilobyte of transaction data.

balance

How much DIVI your wallet can spend right now. A wallet often shows more than one number: spendable (ready to send), unconfirmed (arrived but not yet in a block) and immature (a staking reward that is too new to spend, see maturity).

fee

A small amount of DIVI that every transaction pays to the network. The wallet works it out from the size of the transaction in bytes, not from the amount you send. Sending 1 DIVI and sending 1,000,000 DIVI cost about the same. The Send DIVI tutorial shows a real one.

dust

An amount so small that the fee to spend it would cost more than it is worth. The node refuses to make an output worth less than three times the fee it would cost to spend it.

2Keys, phrases and wallets

wallet

The program (or the file inside it) that holds your keys and talks to the network for you. A wallet does not "contain" coins. The coins live on the blockchain; the wallet holds the keys that can move them. Divi has several wallets; Choose a wallet compares them.

address

Where someone sends DIVI to you. A Divi address is a string of about 34 letters and digits. On the real network it starts with D; on testnet it starts with x or y. A wallet can make as many addresses as you like, and they all belong to the same wallet. See Receive DIVI.

private key

The secret number that lets you spend the coins at one address. Whoever has it owns the coins. Your wallet keeps it for you; you should never need to see it, and never show it to anyone.

public key

The number derived from a private key that anyone may see. Your address is a shortened form of it. You can prove you own an address by signing a message with the private key; anyone can check the signature with the public key.

recovery phrase

Also called a seed phrase or mnemonic: 12 or 24 ordinary English words that your wallet turns into every key it will ever use. Anyone with the words has your coins; with the words you can rebuild the whole wallet on a new computer. Divi wallets follow the BIP39 standard, so the same words work in every Divi wallet. Keep them in a password manager, as Create a wallet shows. The phrase is not the same as the passphrase.

HD wallet

A "hierarchical deterministic" wallet: one that grows every key from a single seed, which is what the recovery phrase encodes. Every Divi wallet is an HD wallet. That is why one phrase is enough to restore all your addresses, including ones you have not used yet.

passphrase

The password you choose when you encrypt your wallet. The wallet locks its keys with it and asks for it before sending or staking. Lose the passphrase and that wallet file is useless, but the recovery phrase still rebuilds the wallet. Do not confuse it with the recovery phrase, and do not confuse it with the optional "BIP39 passphrase" (a 25th word) that some wallets offer.

encryption

Scrambling the wallet's keys so that they can only be read with the passphrase. An encrypted wallet still shows your balance and receives coins; it only needs unlocking to spend or stake. The command in both Divi nodes is encryptwallet.

wallet.dat

The file in which the C++ Divi node and Divi Desktop keep their keys. IronDivi keeps the same information in a folder named wallet.dat. Anyone who copies the file gets your coins unless it is encrypted, which is why Back up your wallet says your recovery phrase is the backup, and a copy of the file is only ever made after encryption.

backup

A second copy of what you need to get your coins back: for a Divi wallet, that is the recovery phrase in a password manager. A wallet file copy is a backup too, but a riskier one. Back up your wallet explains which to use when.

password manager

An app that stores secrets encrypted, syncs them between your devices and backs them up for you: Proton Pass, 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, Keeper or Apple's Passwords app. The tutorials put the recovery phrase there, not on paper alone.

watch-only

An address or wallet you can see but not spend from, because you have the address but not the private key. Explorers are watch-only by nature: they show every address but can spend from none.

3Blocks and transactions

blockchain

The shared record of every Divi transaction ever made, kept by every node. New transactions are added in batches called blocks, and each block points at the one before it, so nothing already written can be changed without everyone noticing.

block

A batch of transactions added to the blockchain together. Divi aims for one block a minute. Each block is made by a staker (see staking) who gets a reward for it. The block height is the block's number, counted from the first block.

transaction

A record that moves DIVI from some addresses to others. It spends one or more UTXOs as inputs and creates new ones as outputs. A transaction is final once it is in a block with enough confirmations. See Read a transaction.

txid

The transaction ID: 64 hexadecimal characters that identify one transaction forever. Paste it into an explorer to see the transaction. Your wallet shows it after every send.

UTXO

An "unspent transaction output": one chunk of DIVI sitting at an address, waiting to be spent. Your balance is the sum of your UTXOs. When you send 10 DIVI from a 25 DIVI chunk, the wallet spends the whole chunk and sends 15 back to you as change. Stakers care about UTXOs because each chunk stakes on its own.

change

The part of a spent UTXO that comes back to you. The wallet usually sends it to a fresh address of yours, so a transaction you made often has two outputs: the payment and the change.

confirmation

The number of blocks on top of the block that holds your transaction. Zero means it is still waiting in the mempool. Explorer 2.0 calls a transaction Unconfirmed at zero, counts 1/6 to 5/6, and calls it Confirmed at six, about six minutes after it got into a block.

mempool

The waiting room: transactions that nodes have heard about but that are not yet in a block. A transaction normally leaves the mempool within a minute or two.

maturity

The waiting time before a freshly minted reward can be spent. On Divi a staking reward is immature for 20 blocks (about 20 minutes) and your wallet lists it as "immature" until then. A coin you receive in an ordinary transaction has no maturity wait; it is spendable as soon as it is confirmed.

coinbase

The first transaction in a block, which creates the block reward out of nothing. On Divi's proof-of-stake blocks the reward is paid through the coinstake instead.

explorer

A website that shows the blockchain: any address, transaction or block. Divi has Explorer 2.0 (with a testnet version) and the community's long-standing chainz. An explorer can only look; it can never spend.

4Staking, the lottery and vaults

proof of stake

The way Divi decides who makes the next block. Instead of burning electricity on puzzles (proof of work), each coin gets a chance to win the next block, so the more DIVI you keep online and staking, the more blocks you make. Divi used proof of work only for its first 100 blocks and has used proof of stake ever since.

staking

Keeping a wallet with DIVI in it online and unlocked for staking, so it can win blocks and earn rewards. A UTXO can stake once it is at least an hour old. How often you win depends on how much you stake compared with everyone else; How staking works and Staking returns go deeper.

coinstake

The special transaction in a proof-of-stake block that proves the block maker's coins won. It spends the winning UTXO and sends it straight back to its owner with the reward added. That is why a staking address shows the same coins "received" again and again in an explorer.

block reward

The new DIVI created in each block, shared between the staker who made the block, the network's masternodes, the treasury and the lottery pot. The amount was 1,250 DIVI a block at launch and falls by 100 a year after the second year, down to a floor of 250. Of each block's reward, 50 DIVI is set aside for the lottery.

lottery

Divi's weekly bonus for stakers. The 50 DIVI set aside from every block adds up for 10,080 blocks (one week); then the chain picks 11 winning stakes. Half the pot goes to the first winner and the rest is shared equally by the other ten. Only a stake of more than 10,000 DIVI gets a ticket. The lottery explains the odds.

vault

A Divi staking vault: coins locked in a special address that one key (the owner) can spend and a second key (the manager) can only stake with. You keep the owner key offline and let a staking server hold the manager key, so your coins earn rewards without ever being spendable from the server. See What is a vault.

masternode

A server that locked a large amount of DIVI to earn part of every block reward. Masternodes are retired; the word still appears in old guides and old explorer pages. Masternodes (legacy) covers them as history.

treasury

A share of each block reward that the chain pays to the Divi project to fund development, in one payment every 10,081 blocks (about a week) rather than every block.

5Software and networks

node

A computer running Divi's network software, holding a full copy of the blockchain and checking every block and transaction for itself. Running a node is the most independent way to use Divi. Divi has two node programs: IronDivi and the original C++ node.

IronDivi

The Divi node written in Rust, with irondivid (the node) and irondivi-cli (the command line that talks to it). It takes the same commands as the C++ node and runs the wallet, staking and vaults. The IronDivi family also includes the web wallet, the browser extension and the Telegram wallet.

divid and divi-cli

The original C++ Divi node (divid) and its command line (divi-cli), currently version 3.0.0. Divi Desktop wraps the same node in a window.

Divi Desktop

The official desktop wallet from diviproject.org for Windows, Mac and Linux. It runs a C++ node inside, with a graphical screen on top and a debug console where you can type the same commands as divi-cli.

BoxWallet

A third-party command-line tool that downloads, installs and runs a Divi node for you and shows its wallet in a text dashboard.

RPC

"Remote procedure call": the way a command line or an app sends commands to a node. Every divi-cli or irondivi-cli command is an RPC call. The node protects it with an RPC user name and password from its settings file.

command line

Typing commands into a terminal window instead of clicking. The tutorials show commands in boxes like this:

irondivi-cli getbalance

You type the command and press Enter; the line below it is what the node prints back.

mainnet

The real Divi network, where DIVI has value and mistakes cost money. Addresses start with D.

testnet

A copy of the Divi network for practice. Its coins are free and worth nothing, so you can try every tutorial there first. Addresses start with x or y. The faucet gives you testnet coins.

regtest

A private test network that runs on your own computer only, where you create blocks on demand. Developers use it to test software without waiting for real blocks.

sync

Catching up: a node downloads and checks every block it has missed before it can show a correct balance. A new node syncs from the first block, which takes a while; after that it only needs the last few minutes.

peer

Another node your node is connected to. Blocks and transactions spread from peer to peer; a node with no peers cannot sync or send.

scam

Anything that ends with you typing your recovery phrase, passphrase or private key into something that is not your own wallet. Avoid scams lists the common ones.

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