Identifiers

Every term in Intuition has a 32-byte identifier, written as 0x followed by 64 hexadecimal digits. Identifiers are derived from content. No server, counter, or contract assigns them.

Derivation#

Each identifier is a keccak256 hash of packed values (abi.encodePacked):

The salts are protocol constants. Each one is the keccak256 hash of its own name, for example keccak256("ATOM_SALT"). The MultiVault contract uses the same derivation, so an identifier computed in an application is the identifier the contract registers.

Deriving identifiers in code#

Use @0xintuition/ids. Do not reimplement the derivation.

import {
  calculateAtomId,
  calculateCounterTripleId,
  calculateTripleId,
} from '@0xintuition/ids';

const atomId = calculateAtomId('hello');
// 0xa0e157e5fa1b17d3b54ec73622ce3317296920a06502661617613d59f58e947e

const tripleId = calculateTripleId(
  calculateAtomId('hello'),
  calculateAtomId('is a'),
  calculateAtomId('greeting'),
);
const counterTripleId = calculateCounterTripleId(tripleId);

The package also exports the salts (ATOM_SALT, TRIPLE_SALT, and COUNTER_SALT), validators such as isValidAtomId and isValidTripleId, and the display helper shortenHex. The validators check only that a value is a well-formed 32-byte identifier. They do not check how it was derived.

Text and bytes#

calculateAtomId accepts a string. How the string is interpreted depends on its form.

The two inputs below are therefore the same atom, because 0x68656c6c6f is the UTF-8 encoding of hello:

calculateAtomId('hello');
calculateAtomId('0x68656c6c6f');
// Both: 0xa0e157e5fa1b17d3b54ec73622ce3317296920a06502661617613d59f58e947e

Whitespace and normalization#

The derivation hashes exactly the bytes it is given. Leading and trailing whitespace, letter case, Unicode normalization form, and, in a JSON document, key order and spacing all change the result. Normalize input before you derive an identifier, and apply the same normalization everywhere.

Why identifiers do not change#

Because an identifier depends only on content:

• Publishing a term onchain does not change its identifier.
• Two parties who describe the same thing with the same data produce the same identifier without coordinating.
• A node can store a term before it is registered onchain. When the registration is indexed, it carries the same identifier, so the node keeps one record for the term.

The derivation is fixed. Changing it would give every term a new identifier, which would split the graph. Treat the functions in @0xintuition/ids as the definition.

Related#

• Atoms and Triples
• Read the chain