Glossary

Core

PATH — the protocol. Not a company, a network, or a product.

Network — an operator of a directory, which admits members, publishes a rulebook and arbitrates disputes. There can be many. A network is not the protocol.

Member — an institution admitted to a network: a fintech, a bank, an electronic money institution.

Operator — whoever runs an implementation. A member is an operator; not every operator is a member.

Subject — the person or legal entity a PATH identity refers to. Carries no personal data in the protocol itself.

Ring 1 / Ring 2 / Ring 3 — open formats / the network's directory and what depends on it / the operator's private data. See Networks and members.

The pillars

PATH ID — who are you. Subject identifiers, verified identifiers, attestations, revocation.

PATH ADDRESS — where to send, and the standing terms of receiving. Opaque addresses, receive targets, standing intent.

PATH REQUEST — what is owed. Payment requests and checkout sessions. The only pillar that starts from the receiver.

PATH CONNECT — who may act. Connection requests, delegation, mandates, scopes, counters, revocation.

PATH SETTLEMENT — how it is proven. Signed receipts, lifecycle, reconciliation.

PATH LIQUIDITY — RESERVED. Routing is out of scope for v0.1; the route field is declared and never populated.

Reachability

PATH FINDER — the reachability layer. One question — can I reach this, and with what? — in two steps.

PATH SONAR — step 1. Which member holds this key? Answered by the network. Ring 2.

PATH RESOLVER — step 2. What does this destination accept? Answered by the holding member, peer to peer. Ring 1.

Payee check — step 3, PIP-0013. Is this the person I think? The holder verifies a name or shows it masked. It never reveals the subject's other identifiers.

PATH CROSSWAY — the external-network resolution layer, PIP-0014. Discovery, then SONAR and RESOLVER against another network's registry, then a payee check. Not a rail and not a directory. The API is operated by Path Global, on request.

Connector — the Crossway component that reads one external registry, under an authorised participant's access. Holds a connector attestation signed by Path Global.

Key — what a lookup takes: an identifier hash, or an opaque address.

Holder confirmation — the holding member co-signing a directory answer.

Reciprocity budget — a search allowance proportional to what a member contributes to the index, rather than a per-second cap.

Constant-shape answer — an unknown key and a key that is known but not visible produce identical responses.

Coverage — what a member declares it may hold: countries, prefixes, identifier types. Used to narrow a broadcast. Not an index.

Addressing

Opaque address — path:4a91c2f7e8d3. Carries no member, network or country. Portable by design; requires SONAR to be reachable by a stranger.

Directory profile — addressing that relies on a network's index. Requires membership.

Relationship profile — addressing between parties who already know each other. Requires no network at all. The proof that ring 1 is genuinely open.

Standing intent — an address's permanent terms of receipt: what it accepts, within what limits. Versioned, never overwritten.

Receive target — what an address actually points at within the member: a wallet, a deposit account, an external destination.

Discoverability — private, network or public, set per entry rather than per network.

Identifiers

Identifier — a phone number, an email address, a bank account, an LEI, a registry number, a tax number.

Normalisation — the canonical form of an identifier before hashing. Part of the protocol: two implementations that normalise differently split the directory in half without noticing.

Pepper — the network-held secret mixed into identifier hashing. Never distributed to members.

Oblivious hashing — a construction where the member obtains the hash without learning the pepper, and the network never sees the identifier. Roadmap; trigger is the second member of a network.

LEI — Legal Entity Identifier (ISO 17442). The global identifier for a legal entity, and the default for a company.

reg: / tax: — local registry and tax identifiers. The registry is always named, never inferred from the country — one country holds several registers.

Interop and settlement

PATH INTEROP — one URI across QR codes, deeplinks and in-app handoffs.

Kind — what a URI points at: pay, request, checkout, subscribe, connect, fconnect, mandate, claim, present, receipt.

Envelope / object — INTEROP carries the envelope; the pillar owns the object.

Receipt — a signed statement that value moved, in one format across every rail.

Commitment — a digest over the terms an address receives on, fixed when the standing intent is set and published separately from any resolver answer.

Payment instruction — a signed, short-lived object from the payee's member giving the concrete destination for one payment on one capability. Approved in PIP-0009.

Value and rails

Rail — a settlement scheme a payer can direct a payment to. Identifiers come from the rail register. An account provider is not a rail.

blockchain — the rail for settlement on a distributed ledger. The ledger is named by chain.

book — the rail for a transfer within one member's ledger.

Capability — one rail and one asset: an entry of accepts, or the via of an instruction or a receipt. See Capabilities and amounts.

Asset — asset_type (fiat or token) and asset_code.

RWA / instrument — a real-world asset is a claim, named by an issuer and an identifier. The capability stays one representation of that claim, on one rail. Proposed in PIP-0012. This version omits the field.

Amount — a decimal string value with its asset.

Payment reference — the value a payer attaches to a rail transfer, set by the payee's member.

Rail reference — an identifier the rail issued for an executed transfer.

Rail profile — the published mapping between PATH objects and one rail's objects. PIP-0003.

Governance

Discovery document — /.well-known/path-configuration. What an operator speaks, claims and how its directory behaves. Unauthenticated by design.

Conformance profile — a named, testable subset, e.g. PATH-REQ.Link. An implementation declares profiles, never "PATH compliance".

Rulebook — a network's rules: admission, obligations, liability, disputes. Published and versioned.

Retired terms

Kept here because they appear in earlier material.