Core concepts
ShardThe prior proven decentralized inference engine NoviQ inherits from - correctness receipts and a fast WAN pipeline. NoviQ owns the privacy problem Shard left open.Sharded inferenceSplitting a model into contiguous layer blocks across machines so no single node holds the whole model.Stage / blockA contiguous range of transformer layers assigned to one worker.ModelRuntimeThe model-agnostic, per-node interface for serving a block: head embeds, middle forwards hidden states, tail produces logits.Sealed wireThe framed, authenticated-encrypted channel between nodes: a JSON header plus raw tensor bytes, sealed with ChaCha20-Poly1305. Privacy terms
Reconstruction adversaryThe attacker that maps the activations a node processes back to the user's input tokens. The metric is the fraction of tokens recovered.Boundary pinningKeeping the embedding and final layers on trusted nodes. Necessary but, on its own, not sufficient.Edge containmentEnsuring raw token ids never leave the trusted head.Activation obfuscationA per-request secret signed permutation of the hidden dimension that lets untrusted nodes compute in a scrambled basis via conjugated weights.Privacy receiptThe record of defenses, per-node recovery scores, the worst untrusted recovery, and whether it passed the declared threshold.worst_untrusted_recoveryThe load-bearing receipt field: the maximum token recovery across all nodes not marked trusted.Trust tierA node's trust level - operator, staked, or volunteer - which decides where it can sit in the pipeline. Network terms
OrchestratorThe control plane that authenticates, dispatches jobs, and meters token counts.Worker classNative (local Ollama GPU) or browser (WebGPU / WebLLM). Swarm-block workers arrive with the v2 engine.Single-node vs swarmv1 runs a full model on one worker; v2 runs a layer pipeline across many workers.GateA concrete, runnable check that must pass before the project advances: A correctness, B WAN, C cache, D privacy.Receipt attestationThe trust level of a receipt. Default is self-reported; verification checks internal consistency, not trusted hardware.Real yieldRewards funded from actual paid inference revenue, not inflationary token emissions. 