Terminology

TLDR

Let it all be understood by everyone. We try our best at that.

Terms

The following DeFi/TradFi terms are used interchangeably throughout the documentation and API reference.

DeFi Term	TradFi Term	Descritption
Token	Financial Instrument	The master file definition of a tradeable item
Solana Account	Blockchain Account/Entity	Aside from transactions/instructions, everything else in Solana is an Account: programs, wallets, tokens, token accounts, authorities, etc.
Wallet	Account	A wallet is the closest representation to a traditional Account at a financial insituttion
Token Account	Position	An entity that holds the balance of a financial instrument held in a TradFi account/DeFi wallet
RWA	Regulated Assets	The life cycle of real-world assets and their exchange of ownership most of the times require the visibility into/oversight of at least some sort of a regulatory entity and cannot be done fully permissionlessly and/or without any reporting requirements
Thaw	Unfreeze	The process of removing restrictions over the movement of assets

Why not only DeFi terms?

We tend to use more often the TradFi terms not only because they are more widely understood but also because we think they are a better representation of the concepts they convey.

Additional reasons for these naming decisions:

Token does not do enough justice to all the type of items that can be traded/settled on a blockchain.

Token is a good term if one mostly wants to convey simplicity (a price, a symbol and a logo) and speculation
Financial instrument is a more generic and encompassing term. Aside from tokens, it can also include RWA tradeable instruments with much more complex/rich master file definitions and life cycles

Token Account is a confusing term for someone coming new to Solana: is this the master file for a token? No? And btw, what is a mint account? Something related to minting tokens? Ah, no - that is the masterfile representation. And where do I see the balances of what I own?

Position has been used for decades and it clicks with anyone involved in trading/finance

Some of the naming choices could be viewed as more pedantic. Like the use of unfreeze vs thaw - after all these terms are very much synonyms. We use though unfreeze because that is what we have seen being used a lot more often within a financial context.

We would not mind to see the Token Account term go away. But otherwise we have no expectation and desire to replace well entreched DeFi terms with those we propose. After all crypto tokens have their place too in finance. We just want to be more clear and easily understood in the communication with our customers, regardless if they know much or not about blockchains.

Meaning for Onboarding

What does it mean to onboard a blockchain entity into Vulcan Forge?

It means to use one of a Create API endpoint to setup the blockchain entity in:

the offchain Vulcan Forge database

optionally, onto the Solana Network (if that entity did not exist onchain already)

Look for Onboarding Endpoint=Yes label in the API Reference to find those Create endpoints that can be used for onboarding.

The alreadyOnchain field part of these endpoints' request body controls this behavior. Note that if the onboarding of an entity is done with alreadyOnchain=true, the entity has to actually already exist onchain (the system verifies that). The corollary to this is that every entity that gets created into the Vulcan Forge offchain database has to have a public key address. And uniqueness rules are enforced at creation time.

TLDR#

Terms#

Why not only DeFi terms?#

Meaning for Onboarding#

TLDR

Terms

Why not only DeFi terms?

Meaning for Onboarding