Accounts

Valence Programs usually perform operations on tokens, accross multiple domains, and to ensure that the funds remain safe throughout a program's execution, they rely on a primitive called Valence Accounts.

A Valence Account is an escrow contract that can hold balances for various supported token-types (e.g., in Cosmos ics-20 or cw-20) and ensures that only a restricted set of operations can be performed on the held tokens. A Valence Account is created (instantiated) on a specific domain, and bound to a specific Valence Program. Valence Programs will typically use multiple accounts, during the program's lifecycle, for different purposes. Valence Accounts are generic in nature; how they are used to form a program is entirely up to the program's creator.

Using a simple token swap program as an example: the program receives an amount of Token A in an input account, and will swap these Token A for Token B using a DEX on the same domain (e.g. Neutron). After the swap operation, the received amount of Token B will be temporarily held in a transfer account, before being transfered to a final output account on another domain (e.g. Osmosis).

For this, the program will create the following accounts:

• A Valence Account is created on the Neutron domain to act as the Input account.
• A Valence Account is created on the Neutron domain to act as the Transfer account.
• A Valence Account is created on the Osmosis domain to act as the Output account.

---
title: Valence token swap program
---
graph LR
  IA((Input
    Account))
  TA((Transfer
    Account))
  OA((Output
	Account))
  DEX
  subgraph Neutron
  IA -- Swap Token A --> DEX
  DEX -- Token B --> TA
  end
  subgraph Osmosis
  TA -- 4/Transfer token B --> OA
  end

Note: this is a simplified representation.

Valence Accounts do not perform any operation by themselves on the held funds, the operations are performed by Valence Libraries.