Glossary

Plain-language explanations of the words Morphit uses. If a term in the UI is confusing, it should be defined here. If it isn't, please file an issue report.

Active key: One of the three private keys your Morphit account has. The active key is for moving BLURT — paying listing fees, sending tips, transferring balances. Morphit asks for it (or rather, for the password that unlocks it on your device) only when you're about to spend. It never leaves your browser.
AEAD: Authenticated encryption: it both encrypts the message and detects any tampering, in a single step.
Blockchain: A blockchain is a shared record book that thousands of independent computers each keep a full copy of — instead of one company keeping it on a single server. Once something is written in, no single party can quietly erase or rewrite it, because every copy would have to agree to the change. Morphit settles on a blockchain (called Blurt) so your orders, ratings, and messages live somewhere no operator — and no government — can secretly alter or take down. That's what makes Morphit hard to censor or shut off: there's no central database for anyone to seize.
BLURT: BLURT is two things: a blockchain (where Morphit's order ops, fees, and chat ciphertext live), and the asset you pay listing fees with. The asset and the chain share the same name. There is no Morphit token — Morphit uses BLURT directly.
BLURT Power (BP): BLURT that you have "powered up" — staked into your account so it can't be spent immediately and it earns you a passive income from staking your BLURT coins. BP gives you weight when voting on Blurt content (separate from Morphit) and is the basis for delegation. Morphit doesn't require any BP; it matters mainly if you syndicate trade announcements to the wider Blurt community.
Broadcast: To send a signed operation to the blockchain. Posting an order, cancelling an order, leaving feedback, sending an encrypted chat message — all of these are broadcasts. Once a broadcast lands in a block, it can't be undone (the operation is on-chain forever); only superseded by a later one.
Counterparty: The other person in a trade. If you posted a sell order and someone messages you to buy, that person is your counterparty. The word is neutral — it doesn't mean "opponent." Both sides of every Morphit trade have a counterparty: each is the other's.
custom_json: A type of operation on the blockchain that carries arbitrary structured data. Morphit's order ops, feedback ops, chat envelopes, and operator registrations are all custom_json operations — they ride on the chain's existing infrastructure rather than requiring a new chain. You don't need to interact with custom_json directly; Morphit builds them for you.
Delegation: Lending some of your BP to another account temporarily, without giving them control of your underlying BLURT. Morphit doesn't require delegation to use, but operators sometimes delegate to new accounts to give them initial weight. Delegations can be undone (with a cooldown period before the BP becomes liquid again).
DNS: Domain Name System: the internet's directory that turns a name like morphit.io into a server address.
ECDH: Elliptic-Curve Diffie–Hellman: a method for two parties to derive a shared secret without ever sending it.
ECIES: A standard scheme for encrypting a message to someone's public key, so only the holder of the matching private key can read it.
ENS: Ethereum Name Service: maps readable names like morphit.eth to decentralized website content.
Federation: Multiple independent Morphit instances that share the same orderbook and chat ecosystem because they all read from the same underlying blockchain. If one operator goes offline (or hostile), users move to another and find the same orders, the same trades, the same reputations. Federation is what makes Morphit uncensorable.
Feedback: A signed, on-chain rating you leave for a counterparty after a trade. Feedback is permanent — it can't be deleted, only responded to. Your reputation in Morphit is the sum of feedback others have left for you over time. Both sides of every completed trade are entitled to leave one piece of feedback.
Fiat: Government-issued currency: dollars, euros, yen, pesos, rubles. The opposite of crypto. On Morphit, fiat is what changes hands off-platform — you and your counterparty agree on a price in fiat (e.g. USD), settle the fiat side privately (cash, bank transfer, your choice), and Morphit handles only the crypto side.
Indexer: The component of a Morphit instance that watches the chain, decodes Morphit-relevant operations (orders, feedback, chat envelopes), and serves them to the web frontend in a usable shape. The chain is the source of truth; the indexer is just a fast cache. Run by the operator, not by you.
Instance: A single Morphit website, run by one operator — the site you're on right now is one instance. Because Morphit is federated, many independent instances all read the same blockchain and show the same orders, trades, and reputations. If one instance blocks you or goes offline, you can switch to any other instance and pick up exactly where you left off.
IPFS: InterPlanetary File System: a peer-to-peer network that serves files by their content hash instead of a server address.
Listing fee: The small BLURT fee Morphit charges when you post a new order. The fee covers operator costs and disincentivizes spam orderbooks. The first order from a new account is free. Listing fees scale gently with how often you post. Cancelling an order does NOT refund the listing fee — it's the cost of the listing, not the trade.
MCP: Model Context Protocol: an open standard that lets AI assistants read data through well-defined tools.
Network fee: Two unrelated things share this name in casual speech: (1) Morphit's listing fee — the BLURT cost of posting an order; and (2) the Bitcoin or Monero on-chain fee that miners take when you settle the crypto side of a trade. Morphit only ever charges the first; the second is between you and the underlying network when you make the actual transfer.
Operator: The person or team running a particular Morphit instance — the website you're looking at right now is operated by someone. The operator runs the indexer and relay servers, sets policies for their instance (rate limits, fee tiers, kill-switch), and earns a share of the listing fees that flow through. If an operator goes hostile, you can switch to a different instance and find your same orders, same trades, same reputation.
P2P: Peer-to-peer: participants connect and transact directly, with no central server or middleman.
Password: What unlocks your private keys on your device. Morphit never sees, sends, stores, or knows your password — it's used locally by your browser to decrypt the encrypted bundle of keys held in your browser's storage. If you forget your password, the keys are gone; that's why Morphit asks you to write down your seed phrase during onboarding.
Permlink: The unique short identifier of an order on the blockchain — something like `morphit-o-2k4f9`. Permlinks let you (and the chain, and other Morphit instances) refer to a specific order without ambiguity. The order's URL on any Morphit instance ends in its permlink, so order links are portable across instances.
Posting key: Another of your account's three private keys. The posting key is for signing content — chat messages, feedback, comments. It's lower-trust than the active key (it can't move BLURT) so a compromise is less catastrophic. Morphit uses it for chat-payload signing and feedback ops; you'll never need to handle it directly.
PWA: Progressive Web App: a website you can install and use like a native app, even offline.
Relay: The component of a Morphit instance that handles things the indexer can't — chat envelope acceptance, fee verification, kill-switch enforcement, anti-spam policies. The relay is the moving-parts side of an instance (the indexer is read-only against the chain). Run by the operator, not by you.
Release op: An on-chain operation broadcast by the @morphit account that publishes the bundle hashes for a new Morphit release. Frontend pages use it to verify they're running unmodified code: each page hashes its own bundle and checks that the hash is signed off in a recent release_op. If the hashes don't match, the page warns you that the operator may be serving tampered code.
RSS: A standard web-feed format for subscribing to a site's updates — here, Morphit's live order feed.
Seed phrase: Twelve English words that, taken together, are the master backup of your account. From the seed phrase your device can re-derive every key your account has. If your device dies and you lose your password, the seed phrase is what gets you back in. Write it down on paper. Don't take a screenshot. Don't email it to yourself. Don't store it in a password manager that lives on the same device.
Sign: To attach a cryptographic signature to a piece of data using one of your private keys, proving the data came from you and hasn't been altered. When Morphit asks you to "unlock to sign," it's about to ask the chain to accept an action on your behalf — posting an order, sending a message, paying a fee. The signing happens locally on your device; the private key never leaves.
TLS: Transport Layer Security: the encryption that protects data in transit — the 'S' in HTTPS.
X25519: A fast, modern elliptic curve used for key agreement: two sides compute a shared secret from each other's public keys.