Immutable

How it is used

Used in pitches, whitepapers and developer docs: immutable ledger, immutable record, immutable smart contract. The noun is immutability. Developers point out that an immutable contract cannot be patched, so bugs must be caught before deployment.

Example sentences

1. Because the contract is immutable, we cannot fix the bug; we have to deploy a new version.

2. Diplomas are stored as an immutable record that employers can check online.

Common collocations

• immutable ledger
• immutable record
• immutable contract
• immutability

Related terms

• blockchainA shared digital record of transactions that is copied across many computers. New data is added in blocks, and each block is linked to the one before it, so past records are very hard to change.
• ledgerA record of who owns what and of every transfer between accounts. A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger: many computers keep the same copy instead of one bank or company.
• smart contractA program stored on a blockchain that runs automatically when certain conditions are met. Once deployed it usually cannot be changed, and it can hold and move funds without a middleman.
• hashA short, fixed-length code produced from any piece of data by a mathematical function. Even a tiny change to the data produces a completely different hash, which makes tampering easy to detect.
• deployTo publish a smart contract to a blockchain so that it gets its own address and can be used. Deploying costs gas, and the code usually cannot be changed afterwards.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• immutable · Software Engineering

More terms: Blockchain Basics

• block
• node
• decentralized
• peer-to-peer
• whitepaper
• on-chain
• off-chain