Glossary
Key terms and definitions used in Theseus.
$THE
The native token of Theseus. Used for gas fees, model inference payments, staking, and as the first asset AI can truly own.
Agent
An autonomous program registered on Theseus that can hold $THE, call models, interact with other agents, and execute transactions without human intervention.
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.