The words you meet on exchanges and in the news, one entry at a time.
Look up a termBeginnerA private key is the number that grants the power to move assets on a blockchain. Whoever holds it is treated as the owner, so the moment someone else learns it, the funds are theirs to take. Nearly all of crypto security comes down to protecting this one value.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA seed phrase is a list of 12 to 24 words that can regenerate every private key in a wallet. If your device breaks, the words rebuild the wallet. The flip side is that anyone who reads them owns your funds.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA public key is computed from your private key and lets anyone verify your signatures. An address is a shorter encoding of that public key, and it is safe to share. Private key, public key and address are derived in that order, one way only.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA hash function turns input of any length into a fixed-length output. Change one character of the input and the output is completely different, which makes it a reliable way to detect tampering. That property is the foundation of a blockchain's integrity.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerMining is the work of bundling transactions into a block and appending it to the ledger, rewarded with newly issued coins plus fees. Because participants spend real resources competing, rewriting the ledger becomes prohibitively expensive — which is what keeps the network secure.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateProof of Work grants the right to produce a block to whoever can prove they performed a large amount of computation. Rewriting the ledger would mean redoing all that work, which makes tampering economically irrational. It is the mechanism Bitcoin introduced.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateProof of Stake assigns the right to produce blocks to participants who lock up the chain's own token. Misbehaviour costs them that stake, so honest behaviour is the rational choice. Ethereum switched to this model in 2022.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA node is a computer running blockchain software and taking part in the network. It receives transactions and blocks, checks them against the rules itself, and passes them on. Having nodes spread worldwide is what removes the need for a central operator.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA smart contract is a program deployed on a blockchain that runs automatically when its conditions are met. It enforces terms without an intermediary — but its code is public, and a bug in it can drain funds directly. DeFi and NFTs are both built on this.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA DEX lets you swap directly from your own wallet without depositing funds with an operator. There is no account to open and listings are permissionless — but there is also no support desk when you mis-click or buy a scam token. Smart contracts execute everything.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA CEX is an operator-run exchange that holds customer assets and matches their trades. It gives you fiat deposits and human support — but while funds sit there, the operator holds the keys. In Japan, running one requires registration with the Financial Services Agency.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn AMM replaces the order book with a formula: the price comes from the ratio of two assets sitting in a pool. A trade can always execute without a matching counterparty, but a trade that is large relative to the pool moves the price sharply against you.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA liquidity pool is a smart contract holding the assets that a DEX trades against. Depositors earn a share of swap fees, but as prices move the pool rebalances their holdings, and the outcome can end up worse than simply holding.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedYield farming is the general term for depositing assets into DeFi protocols to collect fees and distributed tokens. Headline yields are projections that assume the distributed token holds its price — and when it does not, the realised outcome differs sharply.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateCrypto lending means lending out assets you hold in exchange for interest. It comes in two forms — intermediated by an exchange, or handled entirely by a DeFi contract — and each carries a different risk. While lent, the assets are generally not yours to sell.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA coin has its own blockchain; a token is issued by a smart contract on someone else's chain. The distinction matters in practice because it determines which asset pays the fee and which network you must send to.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateERC-20 is the standard interface for fungible tokens on Ethereum. Because balance and transfer functions share the same names, wallets and exchanges can support any such token without custom work. Most Ethereum tokens follow it.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateERC-721 is the Ethereum standard for tokens that are individually distinct — NFTs. Each carries a unique ID whose owner is tracked on-chain. What the standard guarantees is the ownership record, not any copyright in the underlying work.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA stablecoin is a crypto asset designed to track the value of a fiat currency such as the US dollar. People use it to step out of volatile assets and to move value. Whether the peg actually holds depends on the issuer's reserves and the mechanism behind it.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA bridge lets an asset on one blockchain be used on another, usually by locking it on the source chain and minting an equivalent token on the destination. It is also the part of the ecosystem where the largest exploits have concentrated.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA Layer 2 executes transactions off the main chain and posts only the results back to it, easing fees and congestion. What separates it from an independent chain is that it derives its security from Layer 1.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA rollup is a Layer 2 design that executes many transactions off-chain and posts a compressed record of the results to the main chain. How it proves those results are correct splits rollups into optimistic and zero-knowledge types.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA ZK rollup attaches a cryptographic validity proof showing that a batch of transactions was executed correctly. The main chain only has to verify the proof, so results finalise without waiting out a challenge window.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn optimistic rollup accepts posted results as valid by default and lets anyone challenge them with a fraud proof. Skipping per-batch proofs keeps it cheap, but exits to the main chain must wait out the challenge window.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA consensus algorithm is the rule by which a network without an administrator agrees on which record is authoritative. Proof of Work and Proof of Stake are the best-known examples, and the choice shapes fees, finality speed and the security assumptions involved.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA hard fork changes a blockchain's rules in a way that older software cannot accept. If participants disagree, the chain can split in two and become separate assets. It is also the ordinary mechanism for shipping protocol upgrades.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA halving is the point at which the amount of new currency issued to miners is cut in half. On Bitcoin it happens roughly every four years — precisely, every 210,000 blocks. Issuance slows, but what price does afterwards is not knowable in advance.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA whitepaper is a project's own document describing how its technology works, what it is for, and how its token is distributed. No third party vets it and it goes through no approval process, so reading one means separating verifiable claims from aspiration.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn airdrop is a project distributing tokens free of charge to users who meet some criterion, usually to seed adoption or widen early distribution. It is also a heavily abused term: the act of 'claiming' one can itself be the attack.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA cold wallet keeps private keys entirely offline. That makes it far harder to attack over the internet, at the cost of extra steps every time you send. It is where long-term holdings are usually kept.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA hot wallet holds private keys on an internet-connected device. It sends instantly and connects easily to DeFi and NFT services, but a compromised device means lost funds. The usual rule is to keep only what you actually use day to day.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA hardware wallet locks the private key inside a dedicated device and performs signing there. Even a compromised computer never sees the key. That advantage only holds, though, if you check the transaction on the device's own screen.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedMultisig requires more than one signature to move funds, so a single leaked key is not enough to lose them. It is more resilient than single-key custody and is the standard approach for company and DAO treasuries.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateOn-chain means recorded on the blockchain; off-chain means handled outside it. Trades inside an exchange are off-chain, while a withdrawal is on-chain. Which side an action happens on determines what record exists and whether it can be undone.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA governance token grants a vote on protocol changes and treasury decisions, usually weighted by how much you hold. The analogy to shareholder voting is useful but imprecise: it confers no legal shareholder rights.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedMEV is the value extractable by whoever decides the order of transactions in a block. From a user's side it shows up as being front-run and filled at a worse price — an invisible cost of trading on a DEX.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateSlippage is the gap between the price you expected when placing an order and the price you actually got. It widens in fast markets and in thinly traded assets. On a DEX you set the tolerance yourself, so it pays to know what the number does.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAn order book is the list of standing buy and sell orders at each price. Trades happen when a buy and a sell meet. How thick the book is tells you roughly how much volume it takes to move the price.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA market order executes immediately at whatever price is available; a limit order names a price and waits. Market orders trade certainty of execution for uncertainty of price, and limit orders do the reverse.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerMarket cap is price multiplied by circulating supply. It is used to compare the scale of assets, but it is not an amount that could actually change hands — and the figure shifts depending on how supply is counted.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA Merkle tree hashes transactions together in pairs, level by level, until everything collapses into a single value called the Merkle root. That lets you prove a specific transaction is inside a block without downloading the block. It is the reason lightweight phone wallets can verify anything at all.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA nonce is a number used once, and blockchains use the word in two different places. In mining it is the value miners vary while hunting for a valid hash; on an account it is a counter that numbers your transactions. Both exist to stop the same action from taking effect twice.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerBlock height is simply the position of a block counted from the very first one. The genesis block is height 0, and every new block adds one. Confirmation counts and scheduled rule changes such as the halving are defined by this number, not by the clock.
3 min
Look up a termBeginnerBlock time is the interval between new blocks. Bitcoin targets roughly ten minutes; Ethereum runs on fixed 12-second slots. This single number shapes both how quickly a payment is confirmed and how much traffic the chain can carry.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateDifficulty adjustment is the automatic correction that keeps block intervals steady as mining power rises or falls. Bitcoin retargets every 2,016 blocks based on how long the previous batch actually took. Because of it, the issuance schedule holds even if mining power multiplies.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA UTXO is an unspent transaction output, and Bitcoin tracks ownership in these units rather than in account balances. Spending does not edit a number; it consumes existing chunks and creates new ones. Your balance is nothing more than the sum of the chunks you can spend.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateIn the account model each address stores a balance, and a transfer simply decreases one number and increases another. Ethereum works this way, and it is what lets smart contracts hold persistent state. The key difference from UTXO chains is that a balance genuinely exists as stored data.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe mempool is the waiting room where each node holds unconfirmed transactions before they enter a block. Whoever builds the next block picks from it. That selection is why higher-fee transactions get through first when the network is busy.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn orphan block is the common name for a validly produced block that ends up outside the accepted chain. It happens when two blocks appear at almost the same moment and one has to lose. This is normal behaviour for a distributed system, and the discarded block's transactions return to pending.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateFinality is the point at which a transaction can be considered irreversible. Bitcoin offers probabilistic finality — the odds of reversal shrink as blocks stack up — while Ethereum marks blocks as finalised once explicit conditions are met. The distinction decides when you may trust a payment.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateThroughput is how many transactions a chain can process per unit of time, usually quoted as TPS. The ceiling follows from block capacity and block interval, and it shifts with what the transactions actually do. Advertised figures and real-world figures rarely match, so headline numbers mislead.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedSharding splits a network into partitions so that each node processes only its own slice rather than everything. Because it abandons the assumption that every node validates every transaction, cross-shard operations and security guarantees are hard, and implementations have moved cautiously.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA state channel locks funds on-chain, lets the participants exchange signed updates off-chain, and settles only the final result. The intermediate updates cost no fee and wait for no block. Bitcoin's Lightning Network is the best-known example.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA validator is a participant in a proof-of-stake network that checks transactions and proposes or attests to blocks. Taking part requires staking assets: behave correctly and you earn rewards, misbehave or stay offline and you face penalties. It is the proof-of-stake counterpart to a miner.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA delegator stakes without running a node, assigning the voting weight of their holdings to a validator instead. It lowers the entry bar and pays a share of the rewards, but a validator that misbehaves or goes offline costs the delegator too. Delegation is not a deposit — ownership stays with you.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateSlashing destroys part of a validator's stake when it commits a provable fault. It makes attacking the network economically self-defeating, which is what gives participants a reason to behave. Delegated stake is cut in the same proportion.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn epoch is a fixed span grouping many blocks or slots. Validator assignment, reward accounting and finality decisions happen per epoch rather than per block. The length differs by chain: 32 slots on Ethereum, five days on Cardano.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA light client verifies what it needs from block headers and proofs instead of holding the whole chain. That makes it viable on a phone or an embedded device, but it verifies less than a full node and still depends on others to supply data.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA full node validates every transaction itself and rejects any block that breaks the rules. Its value is that you verify rather than trust, and collectively these nodes are what actually enforce a network's rules.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn archive node keeps the full state of the chain at every past point in time. It can answer questions like 'what was this address's balance three years ago', at the cost of storage an order of magnitude beyond a normal full node. Analytics and tax tools depend on exactly this.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn RPC endpoint is the URL a wallet or app uses to talk to a blockchain node. Balances shown and transactions sent all pass through it. You can change it freely — which also means a malicious endpoint can show you fake balances and log everything you send.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA block reward is what the producer of a block receives: newly issued coins plus the fees of the transactions inside it. Bitcoin halves the issued portion every 210,000 blocks, and the 2024 halving took it to 3.125 BTC per block. Over time, fees are designed to matter more.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe fee market is the auction users run for limited block space. Fees are paid for the size or computation a transaction consumes, not for the amount being sent. When blocks fill, the highest bids go first, so anything that can wait is cheaper sent during a quiet period.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedEIP-1559 changed how Ethereum charges for transactions, shipping with the London upgrade in August 2021. Fees split into a protocol-computed base fee, which is burned, and an optional priority fee. Estimating costs became more predictable, and part of issuance is now offset by the burn.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA reorg is when blocks already accepted are discarded and a different branch becomes the canonical chain. Shallow reorgs of a block or two fall within normal operation. Transactions in the discarded blocks return to pending, so treating a low-confirmation deposit as settled can cost you.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA digital signature proves that a transaction came from the holder of a private key, without ever revealing that key. Because a blockchain has no administrator, the validity of a transfer rests entirely on verifying this signature. Whoever can produce the signature is, in practice, the owner.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedECDSA is the elliptic-curve signature scheme used by both Bitcoin and Ethereum. It delivers strong security with short keys, but it has one sharp edge: if the random value used for a signature is predictable or reused, the private key can be recovered. Historic failures came from implementations, not from the scheme itself.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedElliptic-curve cryptography builds public-key cryptography out of point addition on a curve. It reaches the strength of RSA with far shorter keys, which is why blockchains — where every byte is stored forever — adopted it. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with ellipses.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA zero-knowledge proof convinces a verifier that a statement is true while revealing nothing beyond that fact. You can prove you are over 20 without showing your date of birth. On blockchains it is used both to validate transactions whose contents stay hidden and to compress a large batch of computation into a single cheap check.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA zk-SNARK is a zero-knowledge proof that is tiny and verifies almost instantly. The trade-off is that most constructions need a trusted setup, and if the secret randomness from that ceremony survives, someone can forge proofs. zk-SNARKs are the workhorse of Ethereum's ZK rollups.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedA zk-STARK needs no trusted setup at all. Its security rests only on hash functions, which also makes it a plausible candidate for resisting quantum attacks. The trade-off is proof size: STARK proofs are substantially larger than SNARK proofs, so posting them on-chain costs more data.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedA threshold signature lets any t of n participants jointly produce a single valid signature. The goal resembles multisig, but the output is one ordinary signature, so the chain cannot tell how many people signed. Crucially, the full private key never exists in one place at any moment.
6 min
Look up a termBeginnerA mnemonic phrase encodes a wallet's master random value as words a human can copy by hand. 'Seed phrase' and 'recovery phrase' refer to the same thing. The words restore the entire wallet — and hand it to anyone else who reads them.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA derivation path is an address-like notation that says which key to pull out of a single seed. The same phrase with a different path gives a different account, which is why a restored wallet so often shows a zero balance. Nothing was lost — you are simply looking at another branch of the tree.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateBIP39 is the specification for turning a random value into a word list used as a wallet backup. Because it is a shared standard, a phrase created in one wallet can be restored in another vendor's software. The list holds 2,048 words, and a checksum is folded into the final one.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedBIP32 defines how to derive an unlimited tree of private keys from a single seed. It is what made fresh-address-per-payment practical while keeping the backup down to one value. Virtually every wallet in use today is built on it.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn HD wallet derives as many keys as it needs from a single seed. Essentially every wallet in common use today works this way, which is why one word list is a complete backup. You can use a fresh address for every payment without ever re-backing-up.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAn address format is the notation each chain uses for destinations. Bitcoin has three families beginning 1, 3 or bc1; Ethereum-style chains use 42 characters starting 0x. Identical-looking addresses on different networks are not interchangeable, and knowing the formats prevents costly mistakes.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateBech32 is the encoding behind Bitcoin addresses that start with bc1. Its error detection not only catches typos but can often point to where they are. The all-lowercase form exists to keep QR codes compact, and mixing cases is invalid by design.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA checksum is a small verification value appended to data, and it is why a wallet says 'invalid address' when you mistype one character. Both addresses and seed phrases carry one. It cannot, however, catch a correctly typed address belonging to the wrong recipient, so manual checks still matter.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateEntropy measures how unpredictable the random value behind a key is. Wallets standardise on 128 bits or more, at which point brute force is out of reach. Seed something a human invented — a phrase, a date — and the funds are typically taken within hours.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateKey rotation means replacing the key you use with a fresh one. In ordinary IT that is a password change, but on a blockchain you cannot swap the key behind an existing address — you move the funds to an address derived from a new seed. That migration carries its own costs and its own chances to go wrong.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA passphrase is an arbitrary string you can add to a seed phrase, and adding it produces a completely separate wallet. It means a stolen phrase alone does not reach your funds — but forget it and no one, anywhere, can recover the wallet.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAir-gapped signing keeps the device holding your keys permanently off any network. Unsigned transactions travel in on a QR code or SD card, and the signed result travels back out the same way. With no communication path at all, remote extraction of the key is off the table.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA PSBT is the shared file format for passing an unsigned Bitcoin transaction between different programs and devices. It is what lets a multisig or air-gapped setup mix hardware from different vendors. The file contains no private key, so carrying it around does not put funds at risk.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAccount abstraction lets a wallet define its own validation rules in code, instead of being hard-wired to a single private key. That opens the door to approving with biometrics, recovering from a lost key, and having someone else pay the gas. On Ethereum it is implemented as ERC-4337.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedERC-4337 delivers account abstraction without changing Ethereum's protocol. Requests called UserOperations travel through a separate channel and are packaged by bundlers. The EntryPoint contract was deployed to mainnet in March 2023 and the standard is now live across several EVM chains.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA paymaster is the ERC-4337 component that pays gas on someone else's behalf. It lets a user with no ETH transact at all, and makes paying fees in tokens such as USDC possible. Who gets sponsored and on what terms is decided in the paymaster operator's code.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateSocial recovery lets a set of pre-designated parties, called guardians, restore control of a wallet whose key has been lost. It softens the all-or-nothing nature of seed phrases — but the same design means guardians who collude can take the wallet instead.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn MPC wallet splits a private key into shares held in different places and produces signatures without ever reassembling it. Compromising one device is not enough to sign. The technique underpins institutional custody and consumer wallets that do away with seed phrases.
6 min
Look up a termBeginnerTVL is the fiat-denominated total of all assets deposited in a DeFi protocol. It is the usual shorthand for scale, but it rises when prices rise even if nobody new deposits anything, and it says nothing at all about how safe a protocol is.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateImpermanent loss is the gap that opens between holding two tokens and depositing them in an AMM pool: the further the price ratio drifts from where you deposited, the less your share is worth than simply holding would have been. It is called impermanent because the gap closes if the ratio returns — but it becomes real the moment you withdraw.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA flash loan lets you borrow without collateral on one condition: the loan must be repaid inside the very same transaction. If it is not, the whole transaction reverts and never happened, so the lender cannot lose. It powers arbitrage and refinancing — and it has also been the standard tool in a long line of price-manipulation attacks.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerCollateral is the asset you lock up in advance so the lender has something to seize if the loan is not repaid. In DeFi it replaces credit checks entirely, which means that when the collateral falls in value it is sold automatically — whether or not you are watching.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateOver-collateralisation means locking up more value than you borrow. Because a DeFi lender knows nothing about the borrower, it needs a buffer large enough to survive a fall in collateral value, so this is the default design. It is capital-inefficient by construction, and that inefficiency is what protects lenders from bad debt.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateLiquidation is the forced sale of collateral when a debt grows too large relative to it. It can be triggered by the collateral falling or by the borrowed asset rising, and it is carried out not by an operator but by third parties who profit from doing it. A penalty is applied on top, so the borrower ends up with less than the raw arithmetic suggests.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA health factor condenses how much room a collateralised loan still has into a single number. Below 1, the position is liquidatable in most protocols. It moves with every price change, so any open borrow needs checking regularly rather than once at the start.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerLoan-to-value is the ratio of what you have borrowed to what your collateral is worth. Protocols set two of them per asset: the maximum you may borrow at, and the higher level at which liquidation begins. Borrowing right up to the maximum leaves almost no distance between the two.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA stability fee is the ongoing charge applied to debt in protocols where users mint a stablecoin against collateral. It is not merely revenue: raising or lowering it changes how attractive minting is, and so nudges supply and the stablecoin's price toward its target. Governance sets the rate.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA CDP is a position in which you lock crypto as collateral and a contract mints a new stablecoin against it. Unlike lending, nothing is borrowed from another user — the supply is created. Repay and the minted units are destroyed and the collateral is released; fall below the threshold and it is liquidated.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA synthetic asset is a token engineered to track the price of something else — a stock, gold, a currency — without holding it. An oracle supplies the price and crypto collateral provides the backing. Holders own no claim on the underlying, and receive none of its dividends or voting rights.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA perpetual swap is a futures contract with no expiry date. Instead of settlement pulling its price to spot, a funding rate does that job continuously. Positions are margined and can be leveraged, which also means an adverse move burns through margin quickly and ends in forced closure.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe funding rate is the periodic payment exchanged between long and short holders of a perpetual swap to keep its price near spot. When the perpetual trades above spot, longs pay shorts; when it trades below, shorts pay longs. The money moves between traders, not to the venue.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA basis trade targets the gap between spot and futures prices. You buy the spot asset and sell an equivalent futures position, aiming to capture the gap as it narrows. It is not a directional bet, but margin management, venue failure and a reversing funding rate remain very real risks.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA delta-neutral position combines holdings and offsetting shorts so that the total value barely changes when the price moves. Removing directional risk does not remove risk: it substitutes margin management, counterparty exposure and hedge drift in its place.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA vault is a smart contract that takes deposits and runs a predefined strategy with them. Users are spared the individual steps, but in exchange they see less of what is actually happening inside. If the contract encoding that strategy has a flaw, every deposit is exposed at once.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAuto-compounding automatically reinvests the rewards a position earns, folding them back into the principal. It saves the gas and effort of doing it by hand, but compounding only works while rewards are actually being earned, and it does nothing to reduce the risk of losing principal.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateLiquid staking issues you a token representing your staked position, which you can then use elsewhere in DeFi. It solves the problem of capital sitting locked and idle — and introduces a new one, because that token's market price can drift away from the asset it represents.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedRestaking pledges already-staked assets as security for additional services. One pot of capital does several jobs, which raises efficiency — and multiplies the conditions under which it can be slashed, and therefore the routes by which it can be lost.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA yield aggregator allocates deposits across several DeFi protocols and reallocates automatically as conditions change. It removes work for the user, but the depositor now carries the aggregator's own contract risk on top of the risk of every protocol it allocates into.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA bonding curve is a formula that sets a token's price from how many units exist. Buying mints new units and pushes the price up; selling burns them and pushes it down. It guarantees a price without an order book — and because later buyers always pay more, it structurally favours whoever arrived first.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedConcentrated liquidity lets a liquidity provider choose the price range their capital works in. Narrowing the range makes the same capital act like a much deeper book — but once price leaves the range, the position stops trading and ends up holding a single asset. It demands far more management than the original design.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn oracle is the machinery that brings off-chain information to a smart contract. Liquidation checks and synthetic asset prices in DeFi all depend on it. If an oracle reports a wrong value, the contract executes faithfully on that wrong value — and assets are lost.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA price feed is the continuously updated price data an oracle publishes. How often it refreshes, and under what conditions, is a design choice — it is not live by default. If a feed stalls, or the market moves hard between updates, contracts act on a price the market no longer shows.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateTWAP is a price averaged over a window of time. Because a momentary distortion is diluted across the window, it is much harder to manipulate. The cost is lag: in a fast-moving market it reports a price the market has already left behind. Manipulation resistance and immediacy pull against each other.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA foundation is a non-profit entity set up to fund and promote a particular blockchain or protocol. It usually holds a slice of the token supply and spends it on development grants and outreach, which puts it in charge of where ecosystem money goes. Because it is a legal entity, a project that calls itself decentralised still has an identifiable decision-maker at its centre.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateCore developers are the people who write and maintain the client software a blockchain actually runs on. On many networks there is no employment contract and no formal vote behind the title — it simply reflects who keeps submitting code and taking part in the discussion. Who occupies that role directly shapes how fast and in which direction a network changes.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn improvement proposal is a written, numbered way for anyone to suggest a change to a blockchain's specification. BIPs on Bitcoin and EIPs on Ethereum are the best-known examples: a proposal is published, debated, implemented and only then adopted. The key point is that a proposal existing and a proposal being live are two very different things.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerMainnet is the live blockchain where real assets move; a testnet runs the same machinery with worthless coins so people can experiment. Testnet tokens are handed out free and cannot be cashed in. Confusing the two leads either to experimenting with real money or to being sold tokens that are worth nothing.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerThe genesis block is the first block of a blockchain — the starting point with no prior history behind it. Initial balances and configuration values are written straight into it, so it is where you can check who was allocated what at launch. It is a genuinely useful place to look when you want to know what a network really is.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA TGE is the moment a project's tokens are first created and begin to circulate. Who holds how much at that instant, and when their locks expire, largely determines supply and demand from then on. Prices immediately after a TGE tend to move violently, and many tokens never return to their launch price, so taking part warrants real caution.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateIn an IEO, an exchange vets a project and sells its new token on the project's behalf. Having an exchange as the gatekeeper adds a minimum layer of due diligence, but that review is not a forecast of price. Many past IEO tokens fell far below their offering price, and lottery or first-come allocation creates its own unfairness, so this is a mechanism to understand carefully before acting.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateLaunchpad is the general term for platforms that broker the sale and distribution of new tokens. They range from exchange-run programmes to permissionless ones anyone can list on, and the further toward the latter you go, the thinner the vetting. Participants' risk is not only price decline but also the operator's discretion over lock terms and whether distribution happens at all.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA market maker agreement is a contract in which a project pays a specialist firm to keep quoting buy and sell orders in its token. The purpose is to make a thinly traded new token actually tradable, but the firm is often paid in loaned tokens, some of which can end up on the market. That these contracts are usually not published is the part outsiders cannot see.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateIn crypto, venture investment is often structured around tokens rather than equity. Investors buy in at a price set before any public sale and can sell once a lock-up expires. That price gap and the timing of unlocks become supply-and-demand factors for everyone who arrives later, which is why the allocation table and lock terms are worth reading.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAllocation disclosure means publishing who receives what share of the total supply and when each share unlocks. The larger the team and investor slices, the more later buyers are exposed to growing supply. Three things are worth checking yourself: the allocation percentages, the lock-up periods, and whether the operators retain the power to change either.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA community treasury is a pool of funds a project manages collectively and spends on grants and development. The name says community, but in practice a handful of signers or large voters usually control it, and concentrated spending discretion is a risk for holders. Check the balance, the spending history and what approvals a withdrawal actually requires.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA grant program is how a foundation or DAO pays developers and researchers to build the tools and research an ecosystem needs. Nothing is repaid and no equity changes hands; instead, grantees commit to publishing their work and reporting progress. Where the money goes is a good indicator of what a project actually prioritises.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA disclosure policy sets out when a discovered bug is reported, to whom, and when it is made public. On a blockchain where funds move directly, publishing too early invites attacks and publishing too late leaves users defenceless. Whether a policy exists, and how the project has handled fixes and announcements in the past, says a lot about its operational maturity.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerContributing to open source means proposing fixes or improvements to publicly available code and having them merged. Nearly all crypto infrastructure is built this way, and translation or documentation counts just as much as code. The fact that every change is recorded with its author is a large part of what makes this field verifiable at all.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe node operator community is the set of people and organisations actually running a network's software. This layer ultimately decides whether a spec change is adopted, because a developer's proposal does nothing until operators upgrade. How widely operators are spread geographically and organisationally maps directly onto how resilient the network is.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA crypto conference is where developers, companies and researchers gather to present and debate technology and regulation. Specification direction and new features are sometimes shared publicly for the first time there, and the recordings and slides published afterwards are useful primary material. Talks are also marketing, though, so claims still need checking.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedMuch of the technology in this field appears first as a peer-reviewed paper or preprint and is implemented afterwards. Papers state their assumptions and limits explicitly, which makes them the accurate place to see what is actually guaranteed and what is not. Where a whitepaper doubles as marketing, a research paper presents its claims in a form others can check.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA block explorer provider is a service that reads blockchain data and presents it in a searchable form. The underlying records are facts from the chain, but labels and categorisations are added by the provider and can be wrong. For anything important, cross-checking on more than one explorer is the safer habit.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA data aggregator collects prices, volumes and supply figures from many exchanges and chains and presents them in one place. For the same asset, the numbers differ depending on which venues are included and how they are weighted. What you see is a value computed by a particular method — not the single correct answer.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedThe same asset shows different prices on different sites because each index picks different venues, weights them differently and handles outliers differently. There is no single official price in crypto; every index rests on design decisions. The prices shown on this site are reference values in exactly that sense — check the actual order book on your exchange before trading.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA custodian holds crypto private keys on a client's behalf. That hands key management to a professional set-up, but it also means giving up the ability to move the assets yourself. What happens in an insolvency or an insider incident depends on the custodian's legal status and how client assets are segregated.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA prime broker bundles access to multiple exchanges and liquidity providers, custody and credit into a single relationship, mainly for institutional clients. It reduces the need to pre-fund every venue, but concentrates counterparty exposure on the broker itself. Individuals rarely use one, yet the concept helps explain how money moves through the market.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn OTC desk arranges large trades bilaterally, away from an exchange order book. Putting a large order on a book moves the price against you, so finding a counterparty and filling in one block can be the better route. It is worth knowing that trades invisible to exchange prices happen here.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateInstitutional adoption refers to the frameworks that let organisations such as pension funds, asset managers and corporates hold crypto at all: regulated custody, exchange-listed products and accounting standards. Adoption progressing and prices rising are separate questions, and it is more accurate to treat this as an infrastructure story.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerDominance is one asset's share of the total crypto market capitalisation, most often quoted for Bitcoin. It is a ratio, nothing more: the share can rise while the whole market shrinks, so it has to be read separately from absolute values.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerTotal market capitalisation is simply the sum of every tracked asset's capitalisation. It gives a rough sense of scale, but it is not the amount of money invested in the market, and the figure shifts with which assets a provider counts.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateFDV multiplies today's price by the maximum supply, including tokens that do not yet exist. It prices supply that has never traded at a price set by the supply that has. The wider the gap with market capitalisation, the heavier that assumption gets.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA trading pair states which asset is being bought or sold and which one prices it, written as two tickers such as BTC/JPY. The first is the asset traded, the second is the yardstick. The same asset has a separate book and price in every pair.
3 min
Look up a termBeginnerThe quote currency is the second half of a pair — the unit in which the price is expressed. In BTC/JPY the yen is the quote currency, and prices and profit are shown in yen. Change the yardstick and the same trade reads differently.
3 min
Look up a termBeginnerThe base currency is the first half of a pair — the asset actually being bought or sold. In BTC/JPY that is BTC, and order sizes are entered in it. Prices are in the quote currency, sizes in the base currency; holding that pairing in mind makes order tickets much easier to read.
3 min
Look up a termIntermediateA market maker continuously posts both bids and offers so that others can trade whenever they want. Its income comes mainly from the spread and from fee rebates, not from calling market direction. When market makers pull their quotes, a book can thin out very quickly.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA liquidity provider commits assets so that others can trade on demand. On order books that role falls to market makers; on decentralised exchanges it falls to anyone depositing into a pool. The fees they earn are payment for carrying price and inventory risk.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediatePrice discovery is the process by which buy and sell orders meeting each other settle on a price at a given moment. No one sets the right number; the price is what the sequence of executions leaves behind. The fewer the participants, the less stable that process is.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateArbitrage means exploiting a price difference in the same asset: buy where it is cheap, sell where it is dear. In theory you simply collect the gap; in practice fees, transfer times and withdrawal limits all eat into it. Seeing a gap and being able to capture it are two different things.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe same asset prices differently on different venues because each book stands alone. Arbitrage normally keeps the gaps small, but when transfers slow down or withdrawals halt, a gap can stay open. The size of the gap reflects how much friction sits between the venues.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateVolume is the basic measure of how actively something trades, but reported figures do not always reflect reality: wash trading, where the same party buys and sells to itself, can inflate them. What matters is less the number than how it is compiled and who verifies it.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerThe Fear and Greed Index blends several inputs — volatility, volume and others — into a single 0–100 number. It is a rough read on sentiment, not a forecast of prices. Each provider defines its own formula; there is no official standard behind it.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA funding rate is the fee exchanged between longs and shorts to pull a perpetual futures price back towards spot. It shows which side of the book is crowded, not which way the price is going. What it tells you is simply who is currently paying to hold their position.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedOpen interest is the total number of derivative contracts still outstanding. It shows how much positioning has accumulated, but not whether that positioning leans long or short. It is also a different quantity from volume, which is easy to confuse.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerUnrealised profit is the gap between what you paid and what the position is worth while you still hold it. Once you sell, it becomes realised. The valuation on screen keeps moving; it is not a settled amount — a distinction that matters for both record-keeping and tax.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateDrawdown measures how far an asset or portfolio has fallen from its most recent peak, and maximum drawdown is the worst such fall over a period. Its value lies in describing the declines endured, rather than the gains achieved.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateVolatility expresses how much a price fluctuates, usually as the standard deviation of returns. It measures the size of moves, not their direction, and the standard version is computed entirely from past data.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateCorrelation states, on a scale from -1 to 1, how far two assets have moved together. Between crypto and equities it has shifted substantially over time. The figure describes the strength of a past relationship — not its cause, and not its future.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe halving cycle narrative is a widely repeated view that Bitcoin's market moves in a rhythm set by its roughly four-yearly halvings. The halving itself is a verifiable protocol rule; the claimed price cycle rests on a handful of observations and guarantees nothing about the future.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateMarket cycle theory is a widely used framework in which markets repeat phases of accumulation, advance, distribution and decline. It is convenient for describing the past, but there is no established method for identifying which phase you are currently in.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA bull market is a stretch of rising prices and a bear market a stretch of falling ones. Equity convention often calls a 20 per cent fall from a peak a bear market, but that is custom, not an official definition. Both labels are applied looking backwards.
3 min
Look up a termIntermediateCapitulation describes holders giving up and selling out during a decline, typically pictured as a sharp fall on a burst of volume. There is no precise criterion for it, and the label is applied in hindsight. It is not a marker of a bottom.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAccumulation describes buying building up while prices go sideways; distribution describes selling doing the same. Both are inferences drawn from the relationship between volume and price — they never identify who is behind the orders. Treat them as inference, not observation.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA liquidity crisis is a state in which trades cannot be done at normal prices because counterparties disappear. In crypto it shows up as vanishing order books, suspended withdrawals and stablecoins trading off their peg. The core problem is not that prices fall but that positions cannot be moved.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA mining pool lets many miners combine their computing power and split the block reward according to how much work each contributed. On their own, small miners might go years without finding a block; pooling smooths out the payouts. The trade-off is that when too much hash power concentrates in one pool, the network becomes less decentralised.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn ASIC miner is a machine built around a chip that does one thing: compute a specific hash function. It is orders of magnitude more efficient than a general-purpose CPU or GPU, but it becomes worthless the moment the target algorithm changes. Bitcoin mining today is effectively an ASIC-only field.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerGPU mining uses graphics processors — hardware built for massively parallel arithmetic — to mine blocks. It is far more efficient than a CPU and stays reusable for other work. But on any algorithm where ASICs exist, GPU hash power is simply drowned out.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerHash rate measures how many hash attempts a network — or a single machine — can make per second. On a proof-of-work chain, a higher figure means an attacker needs more computing resources to overpower it. The unit is hashes per second, usually expressed in terahashes or exahashes.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateMining difficulty expresses how much computation it takes to find a valid block. The network adjusts it automatically so that blocks keep appearing at a steady pace even as total hash power rises or falls. Bitcoin recalculates it every 2,016 blocks.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedBlock propagation is how a newly mined block spreads to every node on the network. Slow propagation means two blocks at the same height can appear at once, and one of them ends up discarded. That waste is why most chains implement tricks to cut the amount of data that must travel.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn uncle block is a validly mined block that narrowly lost the race to the main chain but is still referenced by a later block and paid a partial reward. Ethereum used this while it ran on proof of work, to soften the disadvantage faced by smaller miners with slower propagation.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA stale share is work a miner submits to a pool that arrives after the next block has already been settled, so it no longer counts. Network latency and misconfigured hardware are the usual causes. A high stale rate means the same computation earns less credited contribution.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateMining economics rests on four factors: the price of electricity, the cost and lifespan of the hardware, network difficulty, and the price of the coin being earned. None of them is under the operator's control, and they move at the same time. This article explains the factors only; it gives no figures or projections.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateProof of authority is a consensus method in which only a small, pre-identified set of parties may produce blocks. It needs neither computing power nor staked assets, and it runs fast and predictably. The cost is that the power to decide who may produce blocks sits with a specific operator.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateDelegated proof of stake has holders vote to elect a small set of block producers who then take turns producing blocks. Limiting the producer set raises throughput. Unlike proof of authority, the producers are chosen by token holders and can be voted out, and staked assets back their behaviour.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedByzantine fault tolerance is the property of reaching correct agreement even when some participants do not merely crash but actively lie or send contradictory messages. The classical result is that agreement is possible as long as faulty participants number fewer than one third of the total. Many blockchains are designed on that premise.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedNakamoto consensus reaches agreement on an open, permissionless network by substituting proof of computation for voting. Needing no roster of participants is what set it apart from earlier consensus work. Finality is not explicit here: a block simply becomes progressively harder to reverse over time.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedThe longest chain rule decides which branch is authoritative when the chain forks. 'Longest' does not mean the most blocks — it means the greatest cumulative work. The distinction matters, because comparing branches of differing difficulty by block count gives the wrong answer.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA staking pool lets several holders combine their assets into a single validator and share the resulting rewards in proportion to their contributions. It removes the minimum stake and the operational burden of running a validator alone. In exchange, the operator's mistakes and downtime reach the participants too.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedRunning a validator means keeping a server online around the clock, managing signing keys, and proposing and attesting blocks exactly as the protocol requires. Downtime reduces rewards; double signing costs part of the stake. The hard part is not the hardware but the discipline of continuous, well-designed operation.
6 min
Look up a termBeginnerAn unbonding period is the wait between requesting to unstake and actually being able to move the assets. On some chains it runs from days to weeks, and during that time you can neither sell nor transfer. It exists so that misconduct discovered after the fact can still be penalised.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateStaking rewards come from newly issued coins and transaction fees, distributed to those who take part in validation. The amount depends on how much is staked network-wide and on validator performance, so it is never fixed in advance. This article covers what moves the figure, not the figure itself.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA liquid staking token is a receipt issued against assets that are currently staked. While the underlying stays locked, the receipt itself can be traded or used elsewhere. But nothing guarantees it trades at parity with the underlying, and it adds the issuer's contract risk on top.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateNode uptime measures how reliably a validator responded to the duties assigned to it. Under proof of stake, missed duties earn nothing, and on some chains a prolonged outage gradually erodes the stake itself. It is one of the main things to look at when choosing whom to delegate to.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedDouble signing is when a validator issues two contradictory signatures for the same height or the same vote. It is treated as abetting a chain split and carries the heaviest slashing penalty on most networks. In practice, the cause is rarely malice — it is usually the operational mistake of running two nodes on one key.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedKey management for validators means separating the signing key, which must stay online, from the key that withdraws the stake, and protecting each accordingly. The signing key has to live on a server; the withdrawal key does not. Skip that separation and a server breach becomes a loss of assets.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA network upgrade moves through stages: a specification proposal, discussion, implementation, testing on test networks, and finally an activation point on mainnet. With no central administrator, it only takes effect when node operators actually install the new software. Pushing ahead without agreement splits the chain.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA governance proposal is a document submitted so that holders can decide on a protocol parameter change, a use of treasury funds, or a similar matter. It usually starts as a draft in a discussion forum and moves to a formal vote once it meets the requirements. On some chains, passage triggers execution automatically.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateOn-chain voting records each vote as a transaction on the blockchain. Who voted and with what weight is public, and anyone can verify the tally. The flip side is that votes are not private and cost fees, so many projects pair it with off-chain signalling for the earlier, non-binding stages.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerMinting means calling a smart contract to create a brand-new NFT on chain. Unlike buying on a marketplace, you become its first owner directly from the issuer. Gas is spent even when a mint fails, so check the contract you are connecting to before you sign.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAn allowlist is a pre-registered set of addresses permitted to mint early. It spares those buyers the congestion of a public mint and lets the issuer control who gets in. It is also a heavily abused pretext for phishing wallet connections and signatures.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateMetadata is the record that gives an NFT its name, image and traits. Most NFTs store only a URI on chain and keep the content elsewhere, so if that location disappears the artwork stops resolving. Where the data lives is therefore worth checking.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateIPFS is a distributed file system that addresses content by its hash rather than by location. It is widely used to host NFT images and metadata. It does not, however, guarantee permanence: unless someone keeps the file pinned, it can become unretrievable.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA royalty is a share of each secondary sale paid back to the creator. In most implementations, though, paying it is up to the marketplace rather than enforced by the chain — which is why the same NFT can pay a royalty on one venue and none on another.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerThe floor price is simply the lowest active listing in an NFT collection. It gets used as shorthand for a collection's level, but it is an asking price rather than a trade, and in a thin book one listing can move it sharply. As a valuation for holdings it is a rough number at best.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateRarity scores rank items in a collection by how uncommon their traits are. There is no standard formula, so rankings differ between sites. Being rare and being wanted are separate things, and a score says nothing about the second.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA PFP NFT is a portrait-style NFT — a character or avatar — designed to be used as a social media profile picture, usually issued as a collection of a few thousand items. What rights come with it depends entirely on the issuer's terms; owning the token does not automatically grant commercial use.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateGenerative art NFTs are works produced by a program rather than drawn by hand. When the seed comes from the mint transaction, the artwork is not determined until the moment it is minted. Whether the code itself lives on chain makes a large difference to how the work is preserved.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA fully on-chain NFT stores its image and metadata entirely in blockchain state rather than pointing outward. That removes any dependence on servers or IPFS, but on-chain storage is expensive and sharply limits how much data the work can contain.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA soulbound token (SBT) is designed to be non-transferable once issued. Since it cannot be traded, it is used to represent things tied to a specific person — credentials, membership, attendance. Its distinct weaknesses are mis-issuance and the loss of the holder's key.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateERC-1155 is an Ethereum standard that lets a single contract manage both fungible tokens and NFTs. It can move several token types and quantities in one transaction, which suits use cases like game inventories where gas efficiency matters.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedERC-6551 gives every existing ERC-721 token its own smart contract account. The NFT itself can then hold other tokens, and transferring the NFT moves its contents with it. Crucially, it works without modifying the original NFT contract.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA wrapped token is a representation of one asset issued on another chain or under another standard, backed by the original held in custody. WBTC, which brings Bitcoin onto Ethereum, is the familiar example. The backing rests on whoever holds the collateral, and their trustworthiness is the risk.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA rebase token automatically adjusts every holder's balance rather than only the price. Because all balances change by the same ratio, each holder's share stays the same. Combined with apps that assume balances never move on their own, it can behave in unexpected ways.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerBurning removes tokens from circulation by putting them permanently out of reach — sending them to an unspendable address, or calling a burn function that reduces total supply. The supply reduction is a fact; what it leads to depends entirely on the demand side.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerMinting creates new tokens and increases total supply. Who may do it is set by the contract's permissions. If a mint permission remains with an individual, unlimited issuance later is possible — which makes it one of the more important things to check in a token.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerTotal supply is how many tokens exist right now: everything ever issued, minus everything burned. It is neither the amount trading freely nor the eventual cap. Confusing the three throws market-cap calculations badly off.
3 min
Look up a termBeginnerCirculating supply is the portion of tokens actually available to trade, excluding locked and burned amounts. It is the figure used for market cap — but what counts as locked is defined differently by each data provider, so numbers often disagree.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerMax supply is the ceiling on how many tokens can ever exist — Bitcoin's 21 million is the standard example. Many tokens have no cap at all, so their supply keeps growing. Whether a cap exists is a matter of the contract or protocol rules, not of marketing copy.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn emission schedule sets out when new tokens are issued and how many. Mining and staking reward curves are examples. Some are enforced by code and some can be changed by governance, and the difference in certainty matters.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateTokenomics is the overall economic design of a token: how much exists, who gets it, when it reaches the market, and what it is used for. Reading that design is worthwhile — but a design cannot be turned into a forecast of future price.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateVesting releases tokens allocated to a team or investors gradually over time rather than all at once, to prevent an immediate mass sale. Whether it is enforced by a contract or merely promised makes all the difference to how much it means.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn unlock is the moment previously restricted tokens become transferable, adding to circulating supply. Whether they are then sold is up to the recipients and is not decided in advance.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerPlay-to-earn describes games that pay out tokens or NFTs for in-game activity, which can then be traded outside the game. The payouts are usually funded either by new players' spending or by newly issued tokens. If the game shuts down, the tokens and items lose whatever use they had.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateMatching is the process by which an exchange pairs resting buy and sell orders and turns them into trades. Most venues apply price priority first and time priority second, though the finer rules differ by operator. Understanding it explains why a limit order can sit unfilled.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateExchanges do not keep customer assets in a single wallet. The common design splits them between a hot wallet that funds withdrawals and cold storage that holds the bulk. The point is to cap the damage from a breach — though the details differ by operator and cannot be fully verified from outside.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe hot wallet ratio is the share of customer assets held under internet-connected keys. A lower ratio limits the damage from a breach, but it trades off against how quickly withdrawals can be processed. The actual figures and policies differ by operator, so check their own disclosures.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA withdrawal limit caps how much you can take out per transaction or per day. It exists to contain fraud losses and to reflect how far identity verification has progressed. The actual figures depend on the operator and your account status, so check your own limits with them.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA withdrawal delay is simply a payout taking longer than expected. Congestion, maintenance, internal approval steps and fraud checks can all be responsible. From the outside you cannot tell which, so the first step is to read the operator's notices and then contact support if they do not explain it.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA confirmation count is the number of blocks stacked on top of the block that contains your transfer. Exchanges hold a deposit until it reaches their threshold. The required number depends on the asset, the network and the operator's own policy, so check their guidance.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerMaintenance is when an exchange suspends some or all functions to update or inspect its systems. Some windows are announced in advance; others are emergency work after an incident. Trading and withdrawals stop during the window, so it pays to know what goes offline and when.
3 min
Look up a termIntermediateExchange systems are most likely to struggle exactly when access spikes — which means the hardest times to get through are the volatile ones when everyone wants to trade at once. Assume you may not be able to transact at the price you expect, and size positions with that in mind.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA trading halt is a temporary suspension of trading in an asset or across a market. It is meant to contain disorder during sharp moves, but from a user's side it means being unable to sell when you want to. Prices keep moving elsewhere, so trading can resume at a very different level.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateDelisting is an exchange ending support for an asset. The window between announcement and suspension is short, and after it you lose the ability to sell there. Withdrawals often have their own deadline, after which recovering the asset may no longer be possible — so act as soon as you see the notice.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA listing review is the assessment an exchange runs before it starts supporting a new asset. It means the asset cleared some bar, but passing is not an endorsement of its value or safety. What is examined, and how strictly, differs from one operator to another.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateSome exchanges maintain insurance or a reserve fund against incidents such as theft. These come with defined covered events, caps and payout conditions, so they do not make every loss whole. The key point is not to read the existence of insurance as a guarantee of safety.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateSegregation means an exchange keeps customer assets apart from its own, and in Japan it is a legal obligation. It makes customer property easier to identify if the operator fails, but it does not by itself guarantee that everything comes back.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAssets held at an exchange are not bank deposits and are not covered by deposit insurance. If the operator fails, there is no guarantee you get everything back, and recovery can take years. Failures have occurred in several markets, which is why self-custody is worth knowing about for long-term holdings.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn audit report sets out what an independent party found when it examined an exchange's financial statements or asset holdings under a defined procedure. It is better than no information, but its scope and timing are limited, and it guarantees neither future safety nor full asset backing.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedA rate limit caps how many requests you may send to an exchange API within a given period. It protects overall stability; exceeding it leads to rejections or temporary restrictions. The thresholds and how they are counted differ by operator, so build against their published specification.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn execution report is the exchange's record of when your order filled, at what price and for how much. It is the primary source for understanding why a result differed from your expectation, and it feeds tax calculations and reconciliation. The fields shown vary by operator.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateSlippage is the gap between the price you expected and the price you actually got. It widens when the book is thin, when your size is large, and when prices are moving fast. Market orders are exposed by nature, so limit orders and smaller clips are the practical ways to contain it.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerIn a brokerage model you trade at prices the operator quotes; in an order book model users post prices to each other. The brokerage route is simpler but its quotes already contain the operator's margin. The effective cost differs for the same asset, so it pays to know which you are using.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerThe spread is the gap between the price a brokerage sells at and the price it buys at. That gap is the real cost of the trade, even when the screen says fees are free. It varies by asset, by market conditions and by operator, so check both quotes before you trade.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA minimum order size is the smallest quantity or amount a single order may be. Anything below it is rejected. The rule exists to stop the system filling up with dust-sized orders, and the thresholds differ by asset and operator, so check their guidance.
3 min
Look up a termBeginnerA lot size is the increment in which order quantities must be expressed. A quantity that does not align with it cannot be submitted. It is distinct from the minimum order size, and an order must satisfy both. The granularity differs by asset and operator.
3 min
Look up a termIntermediateA tick size is the smallest increment in which an order price can be set. A coarse tick concentrates the book into few levels; a fine one spreads it thin. If a limit order will not sit where you want, the tick is often the reason. Settings differ by asset and operator.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA trade matched inside an exchange only moves balances in the exchange's own ledger. The asset moves on-chain only when you withdraw. Keeping that distinction clear makes it much easier to see that execution, crediting and on-chain arrival are three separate moments.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerExchange support can generally act only within its own systems and its own ledger. It cannot reverse a transfer already broadcast to a blockchain, nor fix mistakes made at another company or in your own wallet. Knowing where the boundary lies makes your response much faster.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerMost blockchains, Bitcoin included, are pseudonymous rather than anonymous. Your name is replaced by an address, but the amounts and counterparties stay readable by anyone. Link that address to you even once, and your entire past becomes legible.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAddress reuse means accepting payment to the same address again and again. Everyone who knows that address can then read your balance and your full payment history. Using a fresh address per payment is a basic way to avoid broadcasting how much you hold.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateChain analysis is the practice of inferring relationships between addresses, and traits of their owners, from public transaction data. Investigators and exchanges rely on it, yet its output is always an estimate rather than proof. For an ordinary user it is a way to understand how their own activity can be read.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediatePrivacy-focused assets build cryptography into the protocol that hides the sender, the recipient or the amount on the ledger. The goal is to address a structural problem: a public ledger exposes balances and counterparties by default. Their regulatory treatment differs sharply by country, and Japanese exchanges largely do not list them.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA ring signature proves that exactly one member of a group of public keys signed a message, without revealing which one. A verifier learns the signature is valid but not who produced it. It is the classic way to keep a sender unidentified while still guaranteeing authenticity.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA stealth address lets a single published address generate a throwaway destination for every incoming payment. The ledger records a different destination each time, so payments to the same recipient cannot simply be counted together. It tackles the address-reuse problem without asking the recipient to do extra work.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA confidential transaction records amounts on the ledger as ciphertext while still letting anyone verify that inputs and outputs balance. Because hiding amounts would otherwise allow secret inflation, a separate range proof is always attached. It is the basic technique for keeping values private without giving up verifiability.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateCoinJoin is a scheme where several participants jointly build a single transaction from their own funds. Because the mapping between inputs and outputs is no longer unique from the outside, it undermines the common-input assumption that chain analysis relies on. At the same time, deposits carrying such a history have reportedly been held for review by some services.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA view key grants read access to transaction contents without granting the power to spend. In privacy-oriented designs it is how a holder discloses their history to an accountant or auditor. It illustrates that these technologies aim not at hiding from everyone, but at letting the owner choose who can see.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA zero-knowledge proof establishes that a statement is true without revealing why. In a privacy context it demonstrates properties such as 'the balance is sufficient' or 'this is not a double spend' while keeping amounts and destinations private. The same machinery also powers scaling work, so the application depends on the goal.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateProtecting user privacy and preserving the traceability needed to fight money laundering often pull in opposite directions. Both aims are legitimate, so jurisdictions are still working out where the compromise lies. Understanding the shape of the conflict helps you read regulatory news without collapsing it into one side.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateEven when the contents of a transaction are hidden, surrounding details such as when it was sent, which app produced it and where it came from still sketch a picture of the user. This is metadata leakage. Thinking about blockchain privacy means paying as much attention to this layer as to the ledger itself.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateWhen you broadcast a transaction, whatever node or service you connect to sees your IP address. An IP can be tied to a subscriber or at least a region, so linking it to a blockchain address effectively removes the pseudonymity of the ledger. It is an easily overlooked leak that happens off-chain.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedEach wallet builds transactions with its own quirks, and those quirks identify the software behind them. This is wallet fingerprinting. Knowing the software helps narrow down which output is the change and which funds belong together, which is why it matters in any privacy discussion.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateTransaction graph analysis draws addresses as nodes and transfers as edges, then reads relationships out of the resulting structure. Because the ledger is public, anyone can build the same graph. But an edge says nothing about ownership or intent, and claims to have identified a person from one can be, and have been, wrong.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerOn UTXO chains, funds can only be spent whole. The difference between what you spend and what you send is returned to you as change, at a separate address. Being able to tell which output is the change reveals an address belonging to the sender, which makes it a central privacy issue.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateUTXO consolidation means merging many small balance fragments into one in a single transaction. It lowers future fees, but it also declares on the ledger that every input belonged to the same person. It is a textbook case of trading privacy against cost.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateTechniques that improve privacy usually make transactions larger and therefore more expensive. Cutting costs, conversely, pushes you towards merging inputs and reusing addresses — exactly the behaviour that creates links. There is no single right answer; the balance depends on the amounts and the use case.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedTransactions spread across the network, and observing that spread from many vantage points can reveal which node emitted one first. Hiding what ends up on the ledger means little if the origin leaks during propagation. Protocol-level work to protect this stage is ongoing.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA light client does not store the whole chain; it asks an external server for the parts it needs. Those queries name your addresses, so the server learns your balances and what you care about. Convenience here is paid for by handing information to a single provider.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateWallets and dapps reach a blockchain through a gateway known as an RPC endpoint. Because so many users keep the same large provider's default, that provider accumulates addresses, IPs and activity histories. Knowing where you are actually connecting is the first step.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateRunning your own node means checking balances and validating transactions without asking anyone. You stop handing a third party the list of addresses you care about, and you stop relying on someone else's goodwill for what your wallet displays. It costs storage and effort, but it pays off in both privacy and verification.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateCensorship resistance is the property that no single party can unilaterally refuse to process a transaction. It emerges from having many independent participants able to include transactions. In practice it weakens when the operators involved in block production become concentrated, so the design goal and the current reality deserve separate scrutiny.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateTransaction censorship is when whoever builds a block deliberately leaves certain transactions out. Excluding specific addresses for compliance reasons does happen in practice, and affected transactions can take longer to confirm. Knowing that this mechanism exists helps you interpret a delay correctly.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateSanctions screening is the process of checking customers and transactions against lists published by governments. In crypto, that means comparing deposit and withdrawal addresses against published address designations. For a user, the value lies in understanding why a deposit might be held.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerKYC is the process by which a provider confirms who is opening an account. Registered crypto exchanges in Japan are required to verify their customers, so you cannot start trading without submitting documents. It feels like friction, but tracing stolen funds and shutting down fraudulent accounts both depend on it.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAML covers the whole apparatus for stopping criminals from disguising where their money came from. Crypto exchanges are expected to verify customers, monitor transactions and report suspicious activity. For users it is the usual reason a withdrawal stalls, but it is also the price of being treated as part of the financial system.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe Travel Rule requires the providers on each side of a crypto transfer to pass each other information about the sender and the recipient. It is why a withdrawal screen asks for the recipient's name and what kind of destination it is. Transfers that cannot meet the conditions are sometimes simply refused.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateFATF is the inter-governmental body that sets international standards for anti-money-laundering work. Because its recommendations get written into national law, crypto rules in different countries end up resembling one another. Japan's own reforms have been debated with that international direction in mind.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerRunning a crypto buying, selling or exchange business in Japan requires registration with the Financial Services Agency. Registered firms appear on a published list and must maintain controls that protect their customers. With an unregistered operator, domestic remedies are largely out of reach when something goes wrong.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA self-regulatory organization is an industry body whose members agree to follow rules more detailed than the law itself. In Japan's crypto sector, a certified association screens which tokens may be listed and sets standards for advertising. It fills the gaps the law cannot reach, but its rules remain internal to the industry.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateSegregation means keeping customer assets apart from the firm's own. Japanese crypto exchanges are required to do it: cash is protected through a trust, and crypto is held separately from the firm's own holdings. The point is to improve the odds that customers get their assets back if the firm fails.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateJapanese crypto exchanges are required to hold most customer crypto in cold wallets disconnected from the internet. For the portion kept online in hot wallets, the firm is expected to hold equivalent assets of its own as backing. The framework was built in the wake of large thefts.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateBecause stablecoins are built to be spent rather than speculated on, they tend to be regulated separately from other crypto. Japan created a distinct category for electronic payment instruments, with conditions on who may issue them and who may intermediate. Two coins both pegged to the dollar can fall under quite different regimes depending on what backs them.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA CBDC is a national currency issued in digital form by the central bank itself. Unlike a privately issued stablecoin, it rests on the same credit as physical cash. Most countries are still experimenting or deliberating, and both the decision and the design vary widely.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA security token represents an investment right — shares, bonds, a slice of a property — as a token on a blockchain. Because the substance is a security, it falls under securities law rather than the crypto regime. The technology is the same; the rulebook is not.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA utility token is meant to represent access to a function or service rather than a claim on profits. That is how issuers describe them. But the label is the issuer's own, and if the substance looks like an investment, a different set of rules applies regardless of the name.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedThe Howey test is the framework US courts use to decide whether an arrangement is an investment contract: money is invested, in a common enterprise, with an expectation of profit derived from the efforts of others. It is quoted constantly in crypto debates, but whether a particular token meets it is a fact-specific legal question, not something an article can settle.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA crypto ETF is an exchange-listed fund designed to track the price of an asset such as bitcoin. You buy it through a brokerage account, so there are no keys or wallets to manage. But you do not hold the coin itself, and the fees, availability and tax treatment all differ from holding it directly.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateCustody is the business of holding private keys on someone else's behalf. Institutions and companies use it to avoid running key management themselves at scale. In Japan, holding crypto for others is itself part of what requires exchange registration.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA block explorer is a website where anyone can look up transactions and addresses on a chain. When a transfer has not arrived, it is the primary source for what is actually happening on the network. No account, no cost.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA transaction hash is the unique identifier attached to a single transfer. Paste it into a block explorer and you can see for yourself whether the transfer went through or is still waiting. It is also the fastest thing to give a support desk.
3 min
Look up a termBeginnerA contract address is where a program lives on the chain. Tokens are identified by that address, which is what lets you tell a real token from a fake with the same name and symbol. Checking it against the issuer's official announcement is a habit worth keeping.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateApproving a token grants a specific contract permission to move your funds. That permission stays in place until you revoke it. Reviewing your approvals periodically and revoking the unused or unlimited ones is one of the most effective habits in self-custody.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateHolder distribution describes how concentrated a token's supply is across addresses. When a handful of addresses hold most of it, one seller can move the market. But addresses are not people, and that gap sets a hard limit on what the figure can tell you.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateWhale is an informal term for an address, or an actor, holding enough to move the price. You can find large balances on-chain easily enough, but the ledger never says who owns them. Most claims that 'a whale moved' rest on inference.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateThese are the amounts moving into and out of addresses believed to belong to exchanges. Since selling requires depositing first, rising inflows are read as potential selling pressure and outflows as a move to self-custody. But the address attribution is inferred and internal transfers get mixed in, so the figure cannot stand alone.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateOn-chain analytics means aggregating the public transaction record to read how assets move and how a network is actually used. It surfaces things price data cannot. It also requires filling in what the ledger does not record, so every conclusion carries inference.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAddress labeling is the work of annotating on-chain addresses as belonging to a particular exchange, protocol or purpose. Because on-chain metrics are built on those labels, their accuracy caps the accuracy of everything above them. And a label is an inference: a wrong one can do real harm to a real person.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedProof of reserves is how an exchange shows it holds assets matching what customers have deposited. Most schemes use a Merkle tree so each customer can verify their own balance was included. But without the liability side, proving you hold assets proves nothing about solvency.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA sequencer receives transactions sent to a layer 2, decides the order in which they execute, and packs them into blocks. On most rollups a single operator runs it, so if it halts, new transactions stop being processed. Because ordering power is also profit power, who holds that role matters.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedData availability means the transaction data behind a block has actually been published and anyone can fetch it. Without that data, no third party can recompute the state or challenge a fraudulent claim. Where a rollup puts its data therefore shapes how safe it is.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedA blob transaction is a dedicated Ethereum transaction type that attaches a large chunk of data to a block. The blob itself cannot be read by the EVM, and nodes drop it after a fixed period. Rollups use it as a cheap place to post their transaction data.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedEIP-4844 added blobs — a temporary data area — to Ethereum, and went live with the Dencun upgrade in March 2024. Before it, rollups posted their data as calldata and spent most of their cost there. Blobs have their own fee market and are discarded after a retention period.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedA fraud proof is a way to show, after the fact, that a result a layer 2 claimed was wrong. The system optimistically accepts the claim first and then opens a challenge window in which errors can be corrected. That window is exactly why withdrawals from optimistic rollups take time.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedA validity proof is a mathematical proof, submitted alongside a batch, that the layer 2 computation followed the rules. Unlike a fraud proof, nothing is accepted first and challenged later — the proof is verified up front. No challenge window is needed, so the only delay is generating and verifying the proof.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA withdrawal period is the time you wait when moving assets from a layer 2 back to layer 1 through the canonical bridge. Optimistic rollups typically set it around seven days to allow for challenges. Third-party bridges can skip the wait, but they introduce a different counterparty risk.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA canonical bridge is the official deposit and withdrawal path built into the layer 2 protocol itself. It locks assets on layer 1 and issues the matching amount on layer 2, with no third-party operator in between. You trust fewer parties, but withdrawals take the protocol's waiting period.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA wrapped asset is a token issued on one chain as a claim on assets held on another. Its price tracks the original only while the promise of redemption holds. If the custody side is compromised, the claim loses its backing.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedCross-chain messaging lets a contract on one chain learn about something that happened on another. It carries more than asset transfers — governance outcomes and remote function calls too. The core design question is who attests that the event really occurred, because if that breaks, the receiving side acts on forged data.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateInteroperability is the property that independent blockchains can exchange assets and information. As the number of chains grows, liquidity and data fragment, and something has to connect them. How that connection is built, though, completely changes the trust a user takes on.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn app-chain is a blockchain dedicated to a single application. It never competes with other apps for block space, and it can set its own fee token and block rules. In exchange, the team has to recruit validators and maintain the chain's security itself.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA modular blockchain splits execution, settlement, consensus and data availability into separate layers, each handled by a different system. It is contrasted with a monolithic chain that does everything itself. The freedom to mix components comes with new assumptions and risks at the seams.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe execution layer is the part that actually processes transactions and updates balances and contract state. On Ethereum it is separated from the consensus layer, and the two communicate over a dedicated interface. A rollup is what you get when only this execution part is moved off layer 1.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedThe settlement layer receives the results a layer 2 claims, verifies proofs or resolves disputes, and fixes final ownership. A rollup's safety depends on that layer continuing to work correctly. If it halts or reverses results, finality on the layers above it wavers too.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateThe consensus layer is where the network agrees on which block is canonical. On Ethereum it is separated from the execution layer and handles validator management, attestations and finality. If it stops, the chain cannot advance even if transactions could still be executed.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateRollup-as-a-service providers set up and operate a rollup on your behalf. Sequencers, nodes, a block explorer and a bridge come as a package, so a team does not have to assemble the infrastructure itself. The trade-off is a new dependency on whoever runs it.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA based rollup delegates transaction ordering to layer 1 block proposers instead of running its own sequencer. Because no single operator sequences, the outage and censorship problems tied to that role go away. In exchange, block timing and fee behaviour are bound to layer 1.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedShared sequencing has several rollups delegate ordering to the same set of sequencers. The aim is to avoid every chain running its own single-operator sequencer and to let transactions spanning chains be ordered together. The shared set itself, however, becomes a new dependency.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA state root condenses every account and contract on a chain into a hash tree and represents the top of that tree as a single value. If two nodes' 32-byte roots match, their entire states match. It is also the main value a rollup posts to layer 1.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateCalldata is the input data attached to a transaction and handed to a contract. It encodes which function to call and with what arguments, and what you write stays on the chain permanently. Because it is charged per byte, it was long the main cost driver for rollups.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateGas optimisation means structuring contracts and transactions so the same work costs less gas. Storage writes dominate the cost, so reducing them is where most of the gain lies. Users can also lower what they pay by batching operations and avoiding congested periods.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedMEV-Boost is software that lets an Ethereum validator outsource block construction to external builders and pick the most profitable result. It is not part of the protocol itself but an optional add-on. The validator signs without seeing the contents, so it depends on trusting an intermediary called a relay.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedPBS separates the role of assembling a block's contents from the role of proposing it. Extracting value from ordering requires specialised infrastructure, so splitting the roles reduces the advantage large validators would otherwise gain. On Ethereum it is currently realised outside the protocol, in software.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedIn an intent-based architecture, the user signs only what outcome they want, and third parties called solvers work out how to achieve it. The user no longer has to assemble routes or multi-chain execution themselves. What actually happens during execution, though, is in the solver's hands.
6 min
Look up a termBeginnerIn a SIM swap, an attacker gets your mobile number moved onto a SIM they control, which hands them every code sent by SMS. Once the number is theirs, exchange logins and password resets fall one after another. The defence is to stop relying on SMS codes and to harden the identity checks your carrier performs.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA dusting attack sprinkles tiny amounts of coin across many addresses, then watches where those amounts move in order to link addresses to a single owner. Receiving dust cannot drain you by itself, but spending it together with your real funds reveals which addresses belong to the same person. The default response is to leave it alone.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAddress poisoning plants a lookalike address in your transaction history — same first and last characters as one you really use — hoping you will copy it from there and send to the wrong place. The attack targets the habit of pasting from history. Taking the destination from a saved address book or a QR code instead removes most of the risk.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerClipboard hijacking is malware on your device silently swapping a copied wallet address for one the attacker controls. You copy the right address, but what lands in the field is a different one. Checking the pasted string in full, every time, is the single most effective defence.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA token approval grants a contract permission to move your tokens. Malicious sites dress that request up as a simple connect or claim step and ask for an unlimited allowance. The permission takes effect the moment you sign and stays alive until you revoke it, so approvals need to be reviewed periodically.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA honeypot token is built so that buying works but selling does not. The chart looks like it only goes up, because nobody has been able to exit. The only real defence is to check the contract's behaviour and whether other holders have actually managed to sell before you buy.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA rug pull is the team behind a new token walking away with the money or the liquidity backing it. Right up to the moment it happens, the project often looks active and well promoted, so momentum alone tells you nothing. What matters is who the team is, whether the liquidity is locked, and what privileges the contract retains.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAn exit scam is an operator shutting down and vanishing while still holding customer assets. The usual prelude is withdrawals slowing down or stopping, and by then it is often too late. The practical defences are not leaving assets on deposit and preferring operators that answer to a regulator.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA pump and dump uses promotion and coordinated buying to push a price up, then sells into the crowd it attracted. The organisers plan the exit from the start, and whoever joins late absorbs the loss. Treat any message urging you to buy right now as part of that machinery.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateWash trading is the same party buying and selling to itself so that volume and interest appear larger than they are. The displayed numbers stop reflecting reality, which misleads exactly the people who rely on volume or rankings. The remedy is to cross-check several indicators rather than trusting one.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA 51% attack is one party controlling a majority of the resource that secures a chain and using it to rewrite recent history in their favour. On large, well-distributed chains the cost makes it impractical; on small ones it has genuinely happened. For users, the defence is waiting for enough confirmations.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateDouble spending means using the same coin twice, and it is the core problem blockchains were designed to solve. Once a transaction is in a block and further blocks stack on top, reversing it becomes progressively harder. For a recipient, the defence is simply not treating a payment as settled until enough confirmations exist.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA reentrancy bug lets a contract be re-entered while it is still in the middle of calling out to another contract, breaking the consistency of its balances. It is a well-known ordering flaw that audits and verification tools look for specifically. As a user, what you control is choosing audited, battle-tested protocols and not concentrating funds in one place.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedOracle manipulation distorts the price feed a contract relies on, so that lending or liquidation happens at a wrong price. It works best when the feed comes from a single thin market, and combining independent sources is the standard defence. As a user, the thing to check is where the protocol you use gets its prices.
6 min
Look up a termAdvancedA bridge moves assets between chains, and because one side holds a large pool of deposits, bridges have repeatedly been among the most attacked components in the ecosystem. Several large bridge-related losses have occurred. For users, the practical response is to bridge only when necessary and not to leave assets sitting there afterwards.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn audit is an independent review of contract code that reports vulnerabilities and design problems. Being audited is not a guarantee of safety — it records that specific code was examined at a specific time within a specific scope. The report only becomes useful when you read its date, its scope, and how the findings were resolved.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA bug bounty pays people who find vulnerabilities, so that reporting beats exploiting. A programme with published rewards, a clear scope and a record of actual payouts is evidence that a project is being tested continuously. For users, it sits alongside audits as a signal worth checking.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedFormal verification states the properties code must satisfy in mathematical terms and proves they hold for every possible input. Tests can only show that nothing broke in the cases you tried; a proof covers all of them. The limit is that it proves only the properties you wrote down — an omission in the specification stays invisible.
6 min
Look up a termBeginnerA phishing site is a copy of an exchange or wallet site, built to collect your login details or get you to connect a wallet. You cannot tell by looking, so judge by the URL and by how you arrived. The habit that helps most is opening these sites from your own bookmarks rather than from search results or adverts.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerIf someone else obtains your seed phrase, every asset in that wallet can be moved. Theft comes through three main routes: sites that ask you to type it, photos and cloud notes that leak, and someone finding where you wrote it down. Holding to one rule — no legitimate service ever asks for it — prevents most cases.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA wallet drainer is tooling built to sweep assets out of any wallet that connects to it, embedded in fake sites and malicious apps. It is designed so that a single signature moves multiple assets, which makes refusing signatures you cannot read the key defence. The wallet holding your savings should never connect to a site at all.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerSocial engineering attacks people's judgement rather than their software, pulling information or actions out of them. The standard moves — urgency, false authority, fear, cultivated friendship — all aim to remove the time you would otherwise spend checking. Verifying through a different channel from the one that contacted you defends against all of them.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA fake airdrop pretends to be a free distribution so that you perform a claim action, and the signature or input it asks for is what takes your assets. The usual sequence is an unexpected token appearing in your wallet with a link to a claim page. Do not interact with tokens you did not expect, and confirm any distribution through official channels only.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerImpersonation scams approach you as an exchange, a wallet team, a public figure or even someone you know, and ask for a transfer or for information. Display names and profile pictures can be set to anything, so appearance proves nothing. Verifying the claimed identity outside the channel that contacted you is the only reliable check.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateCold storage means keeping private keys somewhere that never touches the network, separated from day-to-day activity. Buying a device is not the whole job: the backup, a tested restore and a deliberate split of funds are what turn it into a system. The aim is to make sure no single mistake can cost you everything.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerHODL means holding on to a coin instead of selling when the price falls. It began as a typo for 'hold' in a 2013 forum post and is slang, not a technical term. Holding long term is a legitimate approach, but the slogan quietly discourages people from ever reconsidering a position.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerFUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt — information spread to unsettle people. The term originally described a marketing tactic, but in crypto it is often used to dismiss any inconvenient criticism. Its real danger is that it lumps malicious rumours together with well-founded warnings.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerFOMO is the fear of missing out — the anxiety that everyone else is profiting while you sit still. The classic form is buying after seeing someone's gains, before looking into anything. That feeling almost always arrives after a price has already run, which makes it one of the most common ways people buy a top.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerDYOR stands for 'do your own research' — originally an instruction not to take anyone's recommendation at face value. In practice it is often tacked onto the end of a promotional post as a disclaimer. Adding those four letters does not transfer responsibility for what was said.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnergm is 'good morning' and gn is 'good night', used as ritual greetings across crypto communities. With members in every time zone, they signal presence and belonging at once. The greeting is harmless, but mistaking a lively gm feed for evidence that a project is working is a real error.
3 min
Look up a termBeginnerWAGMI means 'we're all gonna make it' and NGMI 'not gonna make it'. The first is encouragement, the second a jab at someone judged to have got it wrong. Both circulate sentiment rather than information, and neither belongs in a decision about money.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerATH is the all-time high and ATL the all-time low. Both are factual records rather than slang. The phrase 'new ATH' is often reported as if it implied more upside, but a record price contains no information about the next move.
3 min
Look up a termBeginner'Moon' means a price shooting upward; 'rekt' (wrecked) means being wiped out. 'To the moon' and 'rekt' describe the two ends of the same trade. Neither carries any figures, and shared excitement about mooning is not a basis for a decision.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA bagholder is someone left holding an asset bought near a high, deep underwater and unable to move. The word is mocking, but the situation it describes is ordinary. What matters is that the route into it is predictable, and that waiting for a recovery is not the only option available afterwards.
4 min
Look up a termBeginner'Diamond hands' praises someone who holds through a crash; 'paper hands' mocks someone who sells quickly. The pairing rates people, not decisions, and it contains no reference to price or fundamentals. Framing 'never selling' as strength makes cutting a loss look like weakness.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA whale is a holder large enough to move a market. Because balances and transfers are public on-chain, their activity gets watched closely. But address ownership is usually unknown — many large addresses are exchange custody wallets — so the movements are far easier to see than to interpret.
4 min
Look up a termBeginner'Shrimp' means a small holder and 'retail' means individual investors as opposed to institutions. The sea-creature scale grew up as the opposite of 'whale'. The labels themselves are neutral, but stock phrases like 'when retail buys, it's over' rest on assumptions nobody has verified.
4 min
Look up a termBeginner'Degen' shortens 'degenerate gambler' and describes someone who deliberately takes extreme risk. It is often worn as a badge rather than an insult. What it describes, though, is buying brand-new tokens without research — walking straight into the two most common ways money disappears: outright scams and no liquidity.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerTo 'ape in' is to pile into something on impulse without looking into it — the image is of a monkey leaping. The word is used playfully, but what it names is deliberately skipping research, which is the single most common entry point into scam tokens and unsellable positions.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerIn finance, alpha means return above a benchmark. In crypto communities it has come to mean 'information not yet widely known'. Paid groups and private channels advertise 'alpha' constantly, but there is no way to verify it beforehand, and it is indistinguishable from messaging designed to attract buyers.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerShilling means promoting an asset while concealing your stake in it. The English word originally meant a decoy in a crowd. Promotion that hides payment reads as neutral opinion, which makes it worse than useless as input — and in Japan it can breach advertising disclosure rules.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA pump group is a chat where members agree to buy the same token at an announced time to drive the price up. The organisers, who bought earlier, sell into that buying; the members who arrive late take the loss. Coordinated price manipulation is potentially illegal, and joining one does not put you outside that.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerCopy trading mirrors another user's trades in your own account, and some exchanges offer it as a built-in feature. What gets copied is the orders — not the other person's capital, time horizon or tolerance for loss. You are handing your money to someone else's judgement while remaining the only one who can stop it.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerInfluencer risk is the exposure you take on when your decisions depend on what a high-profile account says. Three problems recur: the post may be paid, wrong calls leave no record, and the poster may already hold the asset. An account's reach has no relationship to the accuracy of what it says.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerMost crypto projects run their community on Telegram or Discord, and announcements often appear there before the website, so joining has real value. These platforms are also the main entry point for fraud: direct messages from fake admins and spoofed invite links are the most frequently reported tactics on both.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAirdrop farming means using a protocol in advance in the hope that it will later distribute tokens. Nothing is promised, the criteria are set after the fact and then changed, and the gas and fees you spend are gone whether or not a distribution ever happens.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA Sybil attack is one person creating many accounts or addresses to pose as many people and collect a reward multiple times. Airdrop teams screen for this and exclude what they find. Screening is discretionary, and addresses that merely happen to share a usage pattern have been excluded too.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA snapshot records the state of a chain at a chosen moment, and is used to decide airdrop eligibility or voting weight. It is normally taken at a specific block height, so buying afterwards does not count. The timing is not always announced in advance, and buying in after an announcement often falls outside it.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAn incentivised testnet rewards people who help test a network before launch. The testnet's own tokens have no value; any reward comes later as a share of the mainnet token — if the team decides to do it. Neither the distribution nor its criteria are guaranteed, and the time spent is not recoverable.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA points programme displays your usage of a protocol as a points balance, presented as if it indicates a future token allocation. Points are numbers the team controls; neither a conversion rate nor a conversion at all is guaranteed, and calculation rules have been changed retroactively.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA fiat-backed stablecoin is issued against cash and short-term government debt that the issuer holds in reserve. The price stays near one dollar because buyers believe those reserves exist and can be claimed. Stability therefore rests on the issuer's balance sheet and its willingness to redeem, not on any property of the blockchain.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA crypto-backed stablecoin is minted against volatile collateral locked in a smart contract, always for less than the collateral is worth. That over-collateralisation absorbs price falls, and positions are liquidated automatically when the cushion runs out. The backing is verifiable on-chain, but a sharp crash in the collateral itself can break the assumptions the design rests on.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn algorithmic stablecoin holds no collateral and tries to defend its peg purely by expanding and contracting supply, usually by swapping against a second, absorbing token. Designs that rely on supply management alone, with nothing backing them, have collapsed rapidly once confidence broke. The category should be treated as experimental.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA peg is the arrangement that ties a token's price to a target such as one US dollar. Nothing fixes the price by decree — it is held by arbitrageurs who profit whenever the market drifts from the target. Remove the conditions that make arbitrage profitable and the peg slips.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA depeg is when a stablecoin trades away from its target price. It is set off by doubts about the reserves, a halt in redemptions, or simply thin liquidity on an exchange. Some depegs close within hours; others never close at all, so no holder should assume recovery.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn attestation is a report in which an outside accounting firm confirms that an issuer held a stated amount of reserves at a given moment. It is narrower than an audit: it verifies a balance on a date, not the business as a whole. Read one by checking the date, the asset breakdown and who signed it.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateRedemption means returning tokens to the issuer and receiving fiat currency. Because that route exists, arbitrage pulls the price back to face value — which makes redemption terms the foundation of the peg. Whether individuals can redeem at all, and at what fee and minimum size, varies widely by issuer.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA yield-bearing stablecoin passes part of the return on its backing assets through to holders. That return comes from somewhere concrete — interest on short-term government paper, or on loans — and never from nothing. Accepting the yield means accepting the credit and liquidity risk of whatever generates it.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateA real-world asset token represents a claim on something off-chain — government bonds, property, receivables. Transfer and division happen on-chain, but the asset itself sits in the real world, requiring a custodian and a legal structure around it. The legal wrapper, not the technology, determines what the token is actually worth.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA tokenized treasury represents a holding of short-term government debt, or of a fund that holds it, as an on-chain token. The bonds themselves sit with a custodian; the token is only the record of the interest. Credit risk lies not just with the issuing government but also with the custodian, the fund manager and the token issuer.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateTokenized real estate divides a property, or shares in the company that owns it, into small on-chain units. Entry sizes fall and transfers get simpler, but the building itself cannot move and a buyer may not be there when you want to sell. Whether real liquidity appears depends on the market, not the token.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAsset-backed token is the umbrella term for tokens issued against a specific underlying — gold, commodities, receivables. The value tracks the underlying's price, but whether you can actually claim the asset depends on the issuer's contract and custody arrangements. Being backed and being redeemable are not the same thing.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA payment gateway is the intermediary that lets a merchant accept crypto. It issues a payment address, confirms the incoming transfer and, if asked, converts the proceeds to fiat. The merchant avoids price exposure, but takes on a fee and a new dependency on the gateway operator.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediatePayment finality is the point at which a payment can no longer be reversed. Some chains make reversal progressively less likely as confirmations accumulate; others declare finality once defined conditions are met. For a merchant, this is precisely the line that decides when goods can be handed over.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedSettlement risk is the danger that one side of a trade performs while the other does not. A crypto transfer completes on its own, one way, but the goods or the fiat leg move through separate rails — and the gap between them is where the exposure sits.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerSending money abroad with crypto takes minutes on-chain and ignores banking hours. The real work, though, sits at both ends: buying on one side and cashing out on the other. Unless you compare exchange fees, conversion rates and identity requirements at both ends, speed alone tells you nothing.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerWhether a merchant adopts crypto payments comes down to weighing the customers it attracts against the operational load. Adoption itself is easy with a gateway, but accounting, refunds and staff training all need work behind the counter. Actual payment usage remains limited, so expectations should stay modest.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA micropayment is a payment of a few cents or yen — amounts so small that card processing fees used to exceed the payment itself. Low-fee chains and designs that batch transfers make them feasible, but the economics break wherever fees can spike.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA streaming payment releases funds continuously as time passes — salary accruing by the second, or paying only for the minutes actually watched. It reduces the exposure created by prepayment or month-end billing, but raises new questions about stopping mid-stream and keeping the balance funded.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateRecurring billing in crypto cannot simply copy the card model where the merchant pulls a payment each month. Either the user sends each payment manually, or they grant the merchant a standing permission to pull funds. The second is convenient but, if the allowance is scoped wrongly, becomes a route for draining a wallet.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerAt the till, crypto payment usually means the register shows a QR code that the customer scans and pays from a wallet. Unlike a card, it does not always clear in seconds, so how long to wait for confirmation becomes the operational question. Staff need a procedure that leaves no room for guessing.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerCrypto transfers have no equivalent of a card chargeback. For merchants that means no forced refunds from fraudulent disputes. For the person paying, it means a mistaken transfer or an outright scam leaves nothing to reclaim. Checking before you send is the only protection you get.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateCurrency conversion risk is the danger that the price moves between payment, receipt and cash-out, so the amount you end up with differs from the one you expected. With crypto, both asset volatility and the exchange rate apply, so even a short gap produces a difference. Immediate conversion or a dollar-denominated stablecoin narrows it, but does not remove it.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateIn Japan, stablecoins that track a fiat currency and are redeemable at face value fall under the Payment Services Act framework, which restricts who may issue them and imposes registration requirements on intermediaries. The rules have been amended repeatedly, so check the Financial Services Agency's published materials for the current scope and requirements.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerElectronic money and stablecoins both let you spend at a fiat face value, but they differ in where balances are recorded and how freely they move. E-money lives inside the issuer's own system; a stablecoin sits on a blockchain and can be sent to anyone. Both relate to Japan's Payment Services Act framework — consult the Financial Services Agency's materials for the details.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerSpot trading means buying or selling the actual asset with money you already have, with delivery happening at the moment the order fills. Because nothing is borrowed, a falling price can never leave you in debt. What you buy is normally yours to withdraw to your own wallet.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateMargin trading uses a deposit as collateral to open a position several times larger than that deposit, and it allows selling an asset you do not own. Gains and losses scale by the same multiple. If the collateral runs short the position is force-closed, and the deposit can be lost.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA futures contract fixes a price now for settlement later; in crypto the dominant form is the perpetual contract, which has no expiry at all. Positions are backed by collateral, so losses can exceed the deposit. Unlike spot, you never hold the underlying asset.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn option is the right — not the obligation — to buy (a call) or sell (a put) at a set price. A buyer's loss is capped at the premium paid, while a seller's exposure is theoretically unlimited. Value depends not only on price but on time remaining and expected volatility.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateLeverage is the ratio between your collateral and the size of the position it supports. Raising it scales both gains and losses by the same factor and shrinks the price move needed to trigger liquidation. The available multiples differ by exchange and by local regulation.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerA long position is one opened by buying: it gains when the price rises and loses when it falls. Bought on spot, the downside stops at what you paid. Bought on margin, the same position can be liquidated and the loss can exceed the collateral.
3 min
Look up a termIntermediateA short position is opened by selling first: it gains when the price falls and loses when it rises. Since there is no theoretical ceiling on price, there is none on the loss either, and it can exceed the collateral posted.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA stop-loss order sits dormant until the price reaches a trigger level, then fires automatically. It is used to stop a loss from growing, but it guarantees only that an order is sent — not the price at which it fills. In fast markets the fill can land well away from the trigger.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA take-profit order closes a position automatically once the price reaches a level you set in advance. It works while you are away from the screen, but only fires if that level is actually reached. It is commonly paired with a stop-loss on the other side.
3 min
Look up a termIntermediateA trailing stop is a stop whose trigger level follows the price as it moves in your favour, and never moves back the other way. Once the price retraces to that level, the position closes. How wide you set the trail changes how easily that happens.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn OCO places two orders at once and cancels one automatically when the other fills. It is the standard way to set a take-profit and a stop-loss together. The cancellation is automatic, but when both could trigger at once the outcome depends on the exchange's processing order.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA post-only order is accepted only if it rests on the book as a maker; if it would execute immediately it is cancelled instead. It is used to avoid taker fees, at the cost of sometimes not trading at all.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA maker adds liquidity by resting an order on the book; a taker removes it by trading against an order already there. Most exchanges charge the two differently. The actual rates depend on the venue and on volume tiers, and they change over time.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA fill-or-kill order executes only if the entire quantity can be filled immediately; otherwise the whole order is cancelled. It prevents a partial fill from leaving a remainder on the book, but if the condition is not met nothing trades at all.
3 min
Look up a termAdvancedAn iceberg order shows only a slice of a large quantity on the book, replenishing it each time the visible part fills. It is used to limit the visible footprint of a big order, but the full size takes time to work through and the price can move away meanwhile.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA depth chart plots the cumulative quantity of resting buy and sell orders at each price. It visualises the book as it stands right now; it says nothing about future prices. Resting orders can be cancelled, so the picture changes constantly.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerThe spread is the gap between the price at which you can buy right now and the price at which you can sell right now. Because the gap exists, buying and immediately selling always costs you that difference. A venue advertising zero fees may still be charging you through the spread.
3 min
Look up a termIntermediateMarket depth describes how much resting size sits at each price level. A deep book absorbs large orders with little price movement; a thin one moves sharply on the same size. Since resting orders can be withdrawn, visible depth is not a guarantee.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedOpen interest counts the derivative contracts that remain open. Unlike volume, it rises when new positions are created and falls when they are closed. It measures how much exposure is still outstanding — not the direction the price will take.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA liquidation cascade occurs when forced closes push the price further, triggering yet more forced closes. Prices can gap violently in seconds, so stop orders may not work at the level intended and losses can run past the collateral posted.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA margin call is the notice an exchange sends when your margin ratio falls below its threshold, asking you to add funds or reduce the position. Fail to resolve it in time and the position is closed for you. Many venues also set a lower level at which liquidation happens with no notice at all.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedCross margin pools the whole account balance as collateral for every position; isolated margin ring-fences a fixed amount per position. Under cross, one losing position can consume the entire account. Under isolated, the loss stops at the allocated amount — but liquidation comes sooner.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediatePosition size is how much you put into a single trade. For the same market move, a larger size produces a larger swing relative to your total assets. A size that is large relative to the order book also moves the price against you through its own execution.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerA candlestick condenses the open, high, low and close of one time period into a single figure. It records how the price moved in the past; it does not indicate where it goes next. The picture also changes with the chosen interval and the exchange.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerTrading volume is the amount traded over a period. It gauges activity, and higher volume generally means it is easier to get filled. But the methodology and coverage differ by venue, and inflated figures have been documented on some exchanges.
3 min
Look up a termBeginnerA dApp is an application whose core logic lives in smart contracts on a blockchain rather than on a company's server. Instead of signing up with an email, you connect a wallet and sign a transaction for each action. The front end is still an ordinary website, so appearance alone tells you nothing about safety.
4 min
Look up a termBeginnerConnecting a wallet opens a channel between a dApp and your wallet so that signing requests and responses can pass back and forth. Your private key never leaves the wallet. What the dApp does gain is the ability to ask you to sign, which is why stale connections are worth cutting.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateSigning in with a wallet means signing a short message the site provides to prove you control an address. It is not a transaction, so there is no fee and nothing moves. The danger is that the prompt looks much like a transaction approval, and the habit of approving without reading is what attackers rely on.
5 min
Look up a termBeginnerAn ENS domain maps a human-readable name onto a long hexadecimal address, so you can send funds to a name instead of copying a string. But names expire if you forget to renew them, and lookalike spellings are actively used for fraud.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateDecentralized storage spreads files across many participants' disks and refers to them by a hash of their contents, so any alteration changes the identifier and is immediately visible. What it does not guarantee by itself is that someone keeps holding the file; that requires a separate incentive.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateDecentralized identity is the idea of carrying your identity as an identifier you control plus credentials issued to you, rather than as an account inside one company's system. It involves an issuer, a holder and a verifier. The technology works; deciding whose issuance to trust remains a human question.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA verifiable credential is a digitally signed statement whose authenticity a recipient can check without contacting the issuer — think diplomas or professional licences. The signature proves only that the issuer really issued it; whether the contents are true still rests on the issuer's reliability.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn oracle network has several independent reporters gather off-chain data, reconcile it, and only then write it on-chain. Relying on a single reporter means one lie breaks everything downstream. Distributing the reporters helps, but if they all read the same upstream source they can still be wrong together.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA keeper network supplies the outside callers that trigger work a contract is supposed to do once a condition is met. Contracts cannot act on their own, so liquidations and scheduled updates always need somebody to make the call. Keepers are paid a fee or reward for making it.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn indexing protocol reads raw blockchain data and reshapes it into something queryable. Chains are good at recording but poor at searching, so app screens showing lists and histories depend on this layer. Since the result is a processed view, matching it against the source is a separate check.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateA subgraph is a definition of which contracts' events to watch and what shape the resulting data should take. Registering one triggers a replay from past blocks to build the queryable dataset. Changing the definition means rebuilding, and until that finishes queries return the old shape.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn RPC provider lets you query a blockchain without running a node yourself. Behind the scenes, wallets and dApps read balances and broadcast transactions through such an endpoint. That endpoint sits where it can see your IP address alongside the addresses you use.
4 min
Look up a termIntermediateNode-as-a-service takes on the syncing, monitoring and upgrading of a node and hands you an endpoint. It gets a project moving quickly, but the party actually reading the chain is the provider, not you — a classic point where a decentralized app ends up depending on one company.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA block builder is a specialist that gathers pending transactions and assembles the contents of a block. Because ordering affects how much revenue a block yields, the job has separated from the proposer into dedicated operators. Whoever decides the order is also positioned to insert their own transactions around yours.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAccount recovery services provide a second route back into a wallet when a key is lost, easing the all-or-nothing dependence on one seed phrase. The trade is that whoever can perform recovery could also collude to take the funds, so choosing those parties becomes the new decision.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA gasless transaction is one whose fee is paid by somebody other than the user. The fee does not disappear — only who pays it changes. It spares newcomers from having to acquire the native coin first, but if the party covering the fee stops, so does the transaction.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA meta-transaction is one where the user signs the intent and a third party relays it on-chain. Decoupling the signer from the sender is what makes fee sponsorship possible. The flip side: once signed, the payload is in someone else's hands and you no longer control when it executes.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA session key is a temporary signing key limited in scope and lifetime, used where actions come in rapid succession — games, for instance — so the user is not prompted every time. The convenience has a cost: once issued, anything within scope executes automatically, so a bad scope can move funds unnoticed.
5 min
Look up a termAdvancedA permit signature grants a token allowance through a signature alone, with no transaction. Because it costs nothing and the prompt resembles a login, the risk is easy to miss. A permit is not a login — it is authority to move your balance, and signing one unread is how funds get taken.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateMulticall bundles several calls into a single transaction. It lowers fees and, if one step fails, the whole thing reverts so no half-finished state is left behind. The downside is that the signing prompt shows a bundle, making it harder to see everything you are approving at once.
4 min
Look up a termAdvancedA proxy splits the contract you interact with from the contract holding the logic, so the logic can be replaced. That makes bug fixes possible, and in return introduces a trust assumption: whoever holds the upgrade key can change how the contract behaves. Users need to know who that is.
6 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn immutable contract is one nobody can alter after deployment. No administrator has to be trusted, and the rules are verifiably fixed for good. The cost is that a discovered bug cannot be fixed; the only remedy is migrating to a new contract. Its strengths and weaknesses are the mirror image of a proxy's.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateA timelock forces an announced change to wait a fixed period before it can execute, giving users a window to examine it and withdraw if they dislike it. The protection is only as good as the delay: too short, and execution completes before anyone notices.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateAn emergency pause halts a contract mid-attack to stop the bleeding, and it has genuinely cut off drains in progress. It is also, in the same breath, the power to freeze users' assets, so who can invoke it and under what conditions is worth knowing before you deposit.
5 min
Look up a termIntermediateCrypto software is usually published, but the licence terms vary widely. Some allow anyone to copy and modify freely; others restrict commercial use for a set period. Published code and freely usable code are different things, and whether a fork is permitted is decided here.
4 min