Glossary

Quick-reference definitions for RDK terms.

LOCAL

A file in your vault — Obsidian, filesystem, Logseq, Notion. You edit these directly. Not on the network. Not visible to the dashboard.

PRIVATE chunk

An indexed piece of content, encrypted with your vault key, stored on RDK Central as ciphertext. Searchable by you (and team members with key access). Encrypted before leaving your machine.

PUBLIC chunk

An indexed piece of content, plaintext on RDK Central. Searchable by any node on the network. Earns USDC tips when retrieved. Immutable.

Vault

The LOCAL folder on your machine that RDK reads from. Examples: ~/Documents/ObsidianVault, ~/notes, etc.

Vault key

The 256-bit AES-256-GCM key generated during rdk init. Used to encrypt PRIVATE chunks before they sync. Stored at ~/.rdk/config.json, encrypted with a machine-derived key.

Indexed

Content that has been chunked, embedded, and synced to RDK Central. Indexed content is either PRIVATE (encrypted) or PUBLIC (plaintext).

Network

The collection of RDK nodes that sync to RDK Central. Includes all PRIVATE chunks (each node only sees what it has keys for) and all PUBLIC chunks (visible globally).

Node

A user's RDK instance. Identified by a node ID. Has its own vault, its own indexed chunks, and its own credentials.

Tip

USDC paid from one node to another when a PUBLIC chunk is retrieved during a query. Calculated by the network based on similarity, quality, rank, size, and freshness.

Chunk

A small unit of indexed content (typically 256–512 tokens). Each chunk has its own embedding, metadata, and visibility state (PRIVATE or PUBLIC).