The organization by identity is at the core of many unique capabilities of Accumulate. Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs) are strings of readable text. For example, an identity on Accumulate could be Acc://BlueOrg.

Accumulate is best described as a Network of chains. There is no single chain that can be considered the Accumulate blockchain. All data is held in subchains under an identity and tokens are held in subchains under an identity.

Each chain is its ever growing Merkle tree, which makes it possible to prove that the contents contained in the chain are complete and immutable.

An innovation that allows a user to organize their transaction so they can be sorted into their own chains and their own state, specifying a different validator for each chain type.

Scratch Space is essentially a mechanism for intermediate data that allows users to record the process of reaching a consensus to the blockchain without changing its state. The Scratch Chain facilitates blockchain-based communication between users for the purpose of managing multisignature transactions, voting on governance issues, and creating multi-party attestations

When chains are created, a manager ADI can be specified. The manager ADI reviews validated transactions before transactions are placed on the main chain. The review process allows the manager ADI to enforce additional rules and requirements, and possibly restructure the transactions once transactions have been validated by the manager ADI.

Transactions can be anchored from one blockchain to another so that a successful attack requires both blockchains to be compromised.

Accumulate can anchor to any Layer 1 blockchain including Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano.

Consecutive Directory Blocks are submitted to a Layer 1 blockchain as an anchor payload.

In Accumulate, users have the ability to upgrade or downgrade security (cycling keys), enable or disable Multisig, backup lower priority keys, and reassign key priority all without moving tokens or exposing sensitive information.

Rather than assigning a one to one relationship between an identity and a key, as most blockchains do between an address and a key, Accumulate associates a hierarchical set of keys with an identity in order to support common enterprise security requirements like key rotation and key recovery. The hierarchy of keys can also be used to support complex permissioning schemes.