Glossary
Core concepts that define how the network explorer categorizes money on the internet.
What moved. A value type is a specific form of tokenized value — a stablecoin, a branded digital currency, or any on-chain representation of value that can be transferred between parties. Each value type has a symbol (e.g. SBC, USDC, cfUSD) and may be deployed across multiple transfer types.
A value type is not a contract address — it is the abstract concept of the value itself. The same value type can exist on Base, Solana, Polygon, and other transfer types simultaneously.
How it moved. A transfer type is the infrastructure — the blockchain or ledger — that carries value from one party to another. Each transfer type has its own consensus mechanism, transaction format, and finality guarantees.
Transfer types are the rails. They do not define what is being moved — only the mechanism by which it moves. A single transfer type can carry many different value types.
The act of value moving. An exchange is any event where a value type moves between parties on a transfer type — a mint, a burn, or a transfer. Each exchange is recorded as a canonical transaction with a unique hash and is the atomic unit of activity on the explorer.
Every exchange has exactly one transfer type (how it moved) and one value type (what moved). Together, these two dimensions — plus the transaction hash — form the complete identity of any exchange in the network.
These three concepts — Value Type, Transfer Type, and Exchange — are the foundation of how the explorer categorizes all on-chain value movement. See the How to Link guide for URL patterns and integration examples.