AI & agentic web glossary: plain-English definitions

A #Name (e.g. #FreaknCreekn) is the unit of identity on hashtag.org. It is yours, not rented. Behind it sit your portal, your audience, your keywords, your AI agent settings, and (optionally) your on-chain naming record on hashtag.space. Unlike a username on a third-party platform, a #Name cannot be quietly demonetized or deplatformed away from you. Keep paying the small annual subscription and it stays yours.

#SPACE is the protocol layer. It is what makes a #Name addressable, transferable, and verifiable, and it is the marketplace where unclaimed names and keywords get auctioned. Most users never need to touch #SPACE directly; buying a #Name on hashtag.org through Stripe or Gigi credits is enough. But the on-chain record on #SPACE is what makes ownership portable away from any single platform, hashtag.org included.

A GEO Portal is what your #Name actually looks like to the world. It is a single page on hashtag.org that lives at a real-world coordinate. Visitors can search for it on the map, read your description and links, message you, schedule a video call, ask GIGI questions about your business, and check out for products or memberships. In product terms: the #Name is the identity, the portal is the experience.

GIGI is the agent layer of hashtag.org. It runs the search you see in the homepage box, the voice answers, the video-call assistant, the keyword discovery, and the per-portal AI replies on your behalf. On a portal, GIGI is grounded in your data (RAG). It answers visitors from your hours, menu, services, and FAQs rather than guessing with a generic LLM hallucination.

Gigi credits are a prepaid USD balance attached to your account. You top up with a card (or stablecoin), the platform records the balance in cents, and from then on AI tasks, voice/video minutes, and keyword purchases come straight out of credits, with no second card swipe per action. Holds for in-flight tasks are escrowed against the balance and released or debited when the task settles, so you always know what is reserved vs. spendable.

A hashtag is a keyword or phrase written after the # (hash, or "pound") symbol, like #travel. You add it to a post to group that post with everything else tagged the same way, so people can discover it. The convention was proposed for Twitter by Chris Messina in 2007, and it now drives discovery on X, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube. (It is very commonly misspelled "hastag.") hashtag.org takes the idea one step further. Instead of a label you stick on someone else’s post, your hashtag becomes a #Name you actually OWN: a permanent, map-pinned portal with its own AI agent that no platform can demonetize, shadowban, or take away.

A keyword is a phrase (e.g. "coffee shop", "ai consultant") that visitors search for inside hashtag.org. You buy keywords against your #Name with an annual bid, and the highest annual bid sits at #1 in the results for that phrase. If someone outbids you, you drop a slot, and we tell you exactly what it would cost for the year to retake #1. Keywords expire if you stop renewing.

Most Visited is the small strip of icons just below the GIGI search box on hashtag.org. It is personalised: it shows the #Names this device has actually opened, in order, so returning visitors get back to their favourite portals in one tap. Portal owners cannot pay to appear here. It is a behavioural shortcut, not an ad slot.

Each keyword has a "top bid": the highest annual amount currently being paid for #1. If a competitor sets a higher annual bid for that same phrase, you are outbid. Your portal still shows up in the results, just below theirs. On hashtag.org we always show you the exact dollar number to retake #1 for the year, so the auction is never opaque.

A blockchain is a database whose entries (blocks) are cryptographically chained, so altering history would mean redoing every later block across thousands of independent computers at once. That is economically infeasible. For hashtag.org, the practical point is that #Names recorded on the chain cannot be silently rewritten by a single party.

A bridge is a protocol that lets you move a token between blockchains, say USDC from Ethereum to Solana. Bridges are useful but have historically been a security risk, so on hashtag.org we keep crypto checkout on a single chain to avoid forcing users to bridge.

A DAO is a group (a community, an investment club, a protocol) whose membership, voting rules, and treasury are encoded in smart contracts on a blockchain. Members vote on proposals on-chain; the contract executes the result. DAOs are how Web3 communities self-govern without a single CEO holding the bank.

A dApp is an app that uses smart contracts on a blockchain for its core logic, with a normal-looking website or mobile app on top. hashtag.org is a hybrid. The marketing experience and most product features are a regular Next.js app, while #Name ownership and crypto checkout flow through dApp-style smart-contract calls underneath.

A DID is an identifier that is owned by you (specifically, by a key in your wallet) rather than issued by a platform. Your hashtag.org #Name behaves like a DID: control of the matching key on #SPACE is the proof you are the owner, which means you can sign in, post, sell, and transfer without permission from any centralised gatekeeper.

An embedded wallet is a crypto wallet provisioned for you in the background when you sign up with email or social login (we use Privy on hashtag.org). You can use it immediately to mint a #Name or hold USDC, with no seed phrase to write down. When you are ready, you can export the keys and move it into a self-custody wallet, and your #Name and assets travel with you.

Gas is the fee a blockchain charges to process a transaction (mint a #Name, send USDC, transfer an NFT). It varies with network congestion and the chain you are on. On hashtag.org, fiat checkouts and credits-based purchases hide gas from you, because we cover or sponsor it. If you self-custody and transact on-chain directly, you pay gas yourself.

Minting is the act of writing a new asset to a blockchain for the first time: issuing a new NFT, registering a new #Name on #SPACE, and so on. After it is minted, the asset has a permanent on-chain record and a current owner that can be transferred or sold.

NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token: an on-chain record of ownership of a one-of-a-kind digital item. Two units of USDC are interchangeable (fungible); a specific #Name or a specific piece of art is not. On hashtag.org / #SPACE, your #Name is effectively an NFT, and that is what makes it transferable and verifiable.

"On-chain" means the data lives on a public blockchain (e.g. who owns a #Name, who sent USDC). "Off-chain" means it lives in a normal app database (e.g. your portal description, your map pin, your Stripe receipts). Most of hashtag.org is off-chain for performance; the ownership-of-truth bits (your #Name, your USDC) are on-chain.

The private key is the cryptographic secret that lets a wallet authorise spending. Anyone who has the private key controls the wallet, period. In an embedded wallet, hashtag.org's provider (Privy) protects the key for you; in self-custody wallets, you protect it via the seed phrase.

A wallet address (sometimes called the public key) is a long string that uniquely identifies your wallet on the blockchain. It is the equivalent of a bank account number: you give it to people who want to send you funds. Sharing it does not let anyone spend your money. Only the matching private key can do that.

A seed phrase (a.k.a. recovery phrase or mnemonic) is a sequence of 12 or 24 ordinary words generated when you create a self-custody wallet. It mathematically derives every private key in that wallet, so it is the single most sensitive piece of information you own in Web3. Never type it into a website, never photograph it, never store it in cloud notes.

Self-custody means the private keys to your wallet are on your device(s), not on a company's server. The advantage is that no platform, hashtag.org included, can freeze, censor, or repossess your assets. The trade-off is responsibility: lose the seed phrase, lose the funds. Most hashtag.org users start with an embedded wallet and graduate to self-custody when comfortable.

A smart contract is a small program deployed to a blockchain. It runs deterministically: the same input always produces the same output, and nobody can change the code at runtime. On hashtag.org and #SPACE, #Names, NFTs, and on-chain payments are all governed by smart contracts, so the rules of ownership are public and auditable.

A stablecoin is a token whose price is held at a fixed value, almost always 1 US dollar. USDC and USDT are the two largest. Stablecoins are how hashtag.org settles crypto checkouts without exposing buyers or sellers to BTC/ETH price swings during the transaction. $19 in USDC stays $19.

A token is a digital asset issued on a blockchain. Some tokens are fungible (one is identical to another, like USDC or ETH); some are non-fungible (NFTs). When hashtag.org accepts crypto checkout, it is accepting a fungible token (USDC) into the receiving wallet.

A crypto wallet is the app (browser extension, mobile app, or embedded inside hashtag.org via Privy) that holds your public/private keys and signs transactions on your behalf. The wallet does not store coins; it stores the keys that prove which coins on the chain are yours. On hashtag.org you can connect any popular wallet (Phantom, Rainbow, MetaMask, Backpack) or use the embedded wallet we create for you on signup.

Web3 is shorthand for the generation of internet apps where ownership of identity and assets is provable on a public blockchain rather than stored only inside a platform's database. On hashtag.org, Web3 is opt-in: most users sign up with email, get an embedded wallet, and never think about it. Web3 only matters if you want full self-custody of your #Name and balance.

Augmented reality (AR) overlays digital content on top of the real world, usually through a phone camera or AR glasses. On the spatial web, AR lets visitors point their camera down a street and see #Names, reviews, deals, and live videos floating on the storefronts they're looking at. hashtag.org's AR layer is rolling out behind portals that opt in.

A digital twin is a software model of something physical that updates in (near) real time. A storefront's digital twin might know its current hours, who is staffing the counter, what is on the shelf. On hashtag.org, a richly-configured #Name with live inventory + AI agent + map pin is a digital twin of the underlying business.

Geo-tagging is attaching a latitude/longitude pair (and usually a human address) to your #Name. That is what causes your portal to appear at the right point on hashtag.org's map and inside "near me" searches. You set this from the portal admin; we then index it for proximity search and AR.

A geofence is a virtual perimeter drawn around a real-world point or area. When a phone or device crosses it, an event fires — for example, a portal could nudge a visitor with a coupon when they're inside its block, or notify the owner that a regular has arrived.

A map layer is a slice of the hashtag.org map filtered by category or topic: Food & Drink, Creators, AI Agents, Real Estate, and so on. Layers stack: switching layers does not change which portals exist, only which ones you currently see.

The spatial web is the idea that the internet should be addressable not only by URL but also by location: a coordinate, a building, a city block. On hashtag.org, every #Name can pin itself to a real place, and visitors can search the map instead of (or in addition to) typing a URL. That is what makes it a spatial product, not just a directory.

An AI agent is more than a chatbot. It can decide which tool to call (search, lookup, email, schedule, charge a card), do it, watch the result, and pick the next step toward the goal you set. GIGI is the agent layer of hashtag.org: it answers visitors, books calls, opens portals, and drives the search box.

The context window is the maximum amount of input (in tokens, roughly characters) an LLM can consider in a single response. A larger context window means the agent can read more of your data (your whole portal description, or the last 50 messages with a visitor) before answering, which usually means better answers.

Fine-tuning is taking a base LLM and continuing its training on examples specific to your domain (your past customer chats, your tone of voice, your product catalogue). For most hashtag.org portals, RAG is enough and you do not need to fine-tune. Fine-tuning is reserved for cases where tone or jargon need to be baked into the model itself.

A hallucination is a confidently-wrong answer from an LLM: invented facts, fake citations, made-up phone numbers. The cure is grounding (RAG): hand the model your real data and tell it "answer only from this". GIGI on a portal is grounded in your portal data, which is why it is far less likely to hallucinate than a general chatbot would.

Inference is the act of running a trained model to get an output. Every reply GIGI gives is one or more inference calls under the hood. Inference is also where AI cost and latency come from, which is why metered actions on hashtag.org (long-running agent tasks, voice minutes) are billed against your Gigi credits balance.

An LLM (Large Language Model) is a neural network trained on enormous amounts of text (and often other modalities) to predict the next token. That ability lets it summarise, answer, translate, code, and reason at human-readable quality. GIGI uses LLMs internally. You generally do not pick the model; you pick the behaviour you want, and we route to the right one.

A multi-modal model is one that can take input and/or produce output in more than one medium. It might read an image and answer in text, listen to audio and reply in voice, or watch a short video and summarise it. GIGI is multi-modal, so a single conversation can mix typed questions, photos of a product, and voice replies.

A prompt is the text (and any attached files, voice, images) that you send to an LLM or AI agent to tell it what to do. "Prompt engineering" just means writing better prompts. On hashtag.org, your portal's system prompt is what trains GIGI to answer visitors in your brand voice.

RAG is the standard way to ground an LLM in private or up-to-date data. The agent retrieves the most relevant snippets from your knowledge base (your portal description, FAQs, menus, hours) and includes them in the prompt before answering. On hashtag.org, every portal has a RAG-grounded GIGI by default, which is why it can quote your hours and your prices accurately.

A "tool" is a function the agent is allowed to call (search the web, look up a #Name, charge a credit, send an SMS). A "tool call" is the agent actually deciding to use one. Tools are why an AI agent can do things, not just say things.

A voice agent is an AI agent operating over a duplex audio stream: it transcribes your speech, plans, calls tools, and replies in synthesised voice with low enough latency to feel like a phone call. GIGI Voice on hashtag.org lets visitors phone a portal and talk to its agent without you having to pick up.

A shadow ban (or "algorithmic suppression") is the soft version of being silenced: your posts are still up, but the platform's feed algorithm shows them to far fewer people without telling you. Because the cause is opaque, you cannot fix it. On hashtag.org, distribution is keyword-auctioned and on-map. The rules are visible, so suppression is not possible.

Audience portability means the relationship is yours, not the platform's. On most social platforms it is not portable: you cannot export usable contact info for your followers. On hashtag.org, the people who follow your #Name and opt in are first-party data; you can message and migrate them anywhere, including off hashtag.org.

Creator sovereignty is the thesis of hashtag.org: a creator should own the channel (the #Name), the audience (the contacts that opted in), and the monetization (the keywords, products, subscriptions) outright, rather than lease them from a platform that can change the rules. Every hashtag.org product decision rolls up to that thesis.

Demonetization is when a platform (YouTube, Meta, TikTok) decides ads can no longer run on your content, or that you no longer qualify for its monetization programme, usually based on opaque policy or algorithmic flags. Your videos still exist; your income does not. hashtag.org's answer is to put the audience and the monetization on a #Name you own, not on a channel you rent.

Deplatforming is the harder version of demonetization: the account is removed, the videos are gone, the followers are unreachable. Because hashtag.org's ownership lives on #SPACE, your #Name and the contact graph it carries cannot be unilaterally removed by a single platform.

First-party data is information your audience has shared directly with you (email, phone, opt-in preferences, purchase history) on your property. It is more durable and more legal than data inferred from third-party platforms, and on hashtag.org every portal owner gets first-party data on its visitors and members by default.

Crypto checkout settles a purchase in stablecoin (USDC) directly from your connected or embedded wallet to the receiving wallet. It is opt-in; you only see it if you connect a wallet. The amount is denominated in USD, so there is no token-price exposure on the buyer or seller side during the transaction.

When you start an action whose final cost is uncertain, like a long agent task or a multi-message voice call, the platform places a hold (escrow) against your Gigi credits balance for the upper-bound estimate. When the action settles, the hold is converted to a real debit for the actual cost, and the unused portion is released back to spendable credits.

Fiat checkout on hashtag.org is the regular card-based path, run through Stripe. It supports one-off purchases (e.g. claiming a #Name) and recurring annual subscriptions (e.g. keyword renewals). No crypto wallet is required, and most users buy this way.

Resellers are independent partners who refer creators and businesses to hashtag.org. They earn a percentage of fiat checkout on the #Names and keywords those users buy, recurring as long as the subscriptions stay active. Becoming a reseller is opt-in via the Partners flow on the marketing site.

Most ongoing rights on hashtag.org (your #Name registration, your keyword positions) are billed as annual subscriptions. We renew on the same date each year via your saved card or your Gigi credits balance. If a renewal fails (and we cannot recover from credits), the asset is marked for expiry and eventually returned to the marketplace.