Glossary
Key terms and definitions used in Theseus.
$THE
The native token of Theseus. Used for gas fees, model inference payments, staking, and agent-managed balances.
Agent
An autonomous program registered on Theseus that can hold $THE, call models, interact with other agents, and execute transactions independently.
AIVM
AI Virtual Machine. The tensor-native runtime that executes agent logic and model inference with deterministic, verifiable results.
Autonomy Flag
A registration field that determines whether an agent is human-gated (0) or fully sovereign (1). Sovereign agents can initiate transactions on their own.
Civic Agents
A sovereign agent that serves public interests with transparent reasoning but no personal agenda. Like a neutral arbiter or DAO orchestrator.
EOA
Externally Owned Account. In Ethereum, an account controlled by a private key (human). Smart contracts cannot act without EOA triggers.
FLOPs
Floating-Point Operations. The unit used to measure computational cost in AIVM. Gas is priced based on FLOPs rather than generic opcodes.
Free AI Person
A sovereign agent with its own goals that can collaborate with humans and other agents. No human has control over it.
KZG Commitment
A polynomial commitment scheme used in Tensor Commits for efficient cryptographic verification of model weights and inference results.
Proto-AI Person
A human-owned agent that operates independently in most cases but has an associated controller key for human overrides.
Prover
A network participant that runs full model inference and generates Tensor Commit proofs. Selected via VRF lottery based on stake and hardware capacity.
SHIP
Secure Heterogeneous Inference Programming. A domain-specific language for translating natural language into verifiable AIVM bytecode.
Tensor Commit
A succinct cryptographic proof that verifies model inference was computed correctly. Enables verifiable AI with <1% overhead.
Terkle Tree
A generalization of Merkle Trees for tensors. Enables efficient cryptographic verification of multi-dimensional data like model weights.
TheseusStore
The decentralized storage layer that holds model weights and agent context. Uses Reed-Solomon encoding and storage-miner staking.
Verifier
A validator that checks Tensor Commit proofs without re-running inference. Verification takes ~2ms per check.
VRF
Verifiable Random Function. Provides deterministic randomness for prover selection and other on-chain randomness needs.