For everyone / Pickle in plain terms

What Pickle is

Live

Pickle is a blockchain built on top of Ethereum. It confirms what you do far faster than Ethereum alone, you pay its fees in ETH rather than in its own token, and right now it is a testnet run by one operator.

What it is

When you do something on Pickle - send funds, use an application - the network works out the result immediately and hands you back a signed promise that it happened, in a fraction of a second. A moment later that result is packed into an ordinary Ethereum-shaped block, which is what a wallet or an explorer shows you as confirmed.

The two speeds are the whole idea, and they have their own page: when is it actually confirmed is the question worth understanding before you rely on anything here.

There is one token, PKL, and it is deliberately not the thing you pay fees with. Fees are in ETH, permanently. Why that choice and what PKL is actually for are separate pages because they are separate questions, and most chains blur them.

What a Layer 2 is

Ethereum is secure and deliberately unhurried: every participant checks every transaction, which is what makes it trustworthy and also what makes it slow and expensive when busy.

A Layer 2 runs the activity somewhere faster and then writes a record of it back to Ethereum. You get the speed of the smaller system, and Ethereum remains where the record ultimately lives. The honest part of that arrangement is the word ultimately: between something happening on Pickle and it being settled on Ethereum there is a gap, and during that gap you are trusting Pickle's operator rather than Ethereum.

How large that trust is, right now, is the next section - and it is larger than it will be later.

What it is not

Phase 0 is a testnet run by a single operator

  • One sequencer orders every transaction and can reorder or censor. If it halts, the chain halts for new execution.
  • The bridge messenger is a trusted key.
  • There is no forced inclusion, and there are no fraud or validity proofs. An independent replica can re-derive the chain from Ethereum and the data-availability layer and detect a divergence, but nothing arbitrates one yet.
  • Development keys are in use throughout, and they are published keys.
  • Test coins and test PKL have no monetary value and are not redeemable for anything.
  • Chain state may be reset without notice during Phase 0, which deletes balances, contracts and history.

In plain terms: one company currently runs the machine that decides the order things happen in, and it could in principle reorder or refuse your transaction. Nothing on the network stops it.

Pickle does not describe itself as decentralised, and the risks page spells out what that means for you rather than leaving it as a word.

It is also not a place to put money. Test coins and test PKL have no value and are not redeemable for anything, and the chain's state may be wiped without warning.

Where to go next

If you write software and came here for parameters and an API, the developer documentation is the other half of this site.