Concepts

How Dassie works, in plain words. Each page links to the spec for the full reasons.

How a payment travels
How money moves through the network: many small packets, each paid or refused hop by hop, inside a STREAM connection.
Settlement hubs
Peers settle only through hubs: a few validators keep a shared ledger backed by one escrow, and what your node sets aside there for a peer is the credit it gives.
Your recovery phrase
Twenty words that are your node and its funds: they name their realm, fix small mistakes, and stay with you. Only a key derived from them reaches the node.
Ledgers, books and realms
Where your money sits: an owner book per asset on the XRP Ledger, an account in a hub, your node's own books, and the test realm they run in.
Core and periphery
A node with a hostname joins the core once its uplinks vouch for it, and forwards payments for others. One without, like the desktop app, connects out to core nodes and is reached through them.
Names and addresses
How people reach your node: by its hostname, or by its node ID at dassiepay.net, and by a short name it holds there. Names are free on the testnet, and the earliest commitment wins.
Peers and holds
How your node keeps its own books with each peer, why the hold in a hub is all the credit it gives, and how it decides which peers to send more through.
Joining the network
How a new node registers with the bootstrap nodes, finds peers that share a settlement hub with it, and becomes a place payments can be routed through.
Exchange rates
Where a node's exchange rates come from, how it prices a conversion by what it holds, and how swaps with its peers and market makers bring it back into balance.
Protocol versions
How nodes that update on different days keep talking, why a node that stops updating loses its peers, and how hubs and snapshots are versioned.
Releases you can trust
How a release is signed, checked before anything unpacks, and rolled back when it fails to start, and what the download mirror can and cannot do.