Crypto Glossary
Every crypto term, defined in plain English — no jargon required to understand the jargon.
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A
Account Abstraction
A wallet architecture that turns crypto accounts into programmable smart contracts — enabling recovery options, gas sponsorship and passkey logins.
Accredited Investor
A regulatory status (based on wealth or income) that gates access to certain private, higher-risk investments.
Accumulation
A quiet phase where informed buyers build positions at low prices, often before a broader uptrend.
Active Addresses
The count of unique addresses transacting in a period — a rough proxy for network usage and adoption.
Address (Wallet Address)
A string of characters that identifies where crypto can be sent on a blockchain — like an account number, but public by design.
Airdrop
A distribution of free tokens to wallet addresses, used for marketing or rewarding early users — and frequently imitated by scammers.
Airdrop Farming
Using a protocol early and actively in hopes of qualifying for a future token airdrop — a speculative meta-game.
Algorithmic Stablecoin
A stablecoin that tries to hold its peg through code and incentives rather than held reserves — a design with a graveyard behind it.
All-Time High (ATH)
The highest price an asset has ever reached — a psychological landmark that markets orbit around.
Altcoin
Any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin — from major networks like Ethereum to small experimental tokens.
AML (Anti-Money Laundering)
The legal framework requiring financial platforms to detect and report criminal money flows — the reason exchanges monitor transactions.
App-Chain
A blockchain built for a single application, trading shared-network effects for custom control and performance.
APY (Annual Percentage Yield)
Yearly return including compounding — the standard way crypto platforms advertise staking and lending rewards.
Arbitrage
Profiting from price differences for the same asset across markets — the force that keeps exchange prices aligned.
ASIC (Mining Hardware)
A chip built to do exactly one job — like mining Bitcoin — thousands of times more efficiently than general-purpose computers.
Atomic Swap
A trustless exchange of coins across two blockchains that either completes fully or not at all — no intermediary.
Attestation
A validator's cryptographically-signed vote that a block is valid — the building block of Proof of Stake consensus.
Automated Market Maker (AMM)
The formula that replaced order books in DeFi — prices set by the ratio of assets in a pool, not by matching buyers to sellers.
B
Backwardation
When futures prices fall below spot — an unusual state in crypto that often signals fear or short-term supply stress.
Bad Debt
Loans a protocol can no longer recover because collateral fell faster than liquidations could execute — DeFi's insolvency.
Basis Trade
Profiting from the gap between an asset's spot price and its futures price — a market-neutral crypto yield staple.
Bear Market
A prolonged period of falling prices and pessimism — in crypto, historically drawdowns of 70%+ lasting a year or more.
Bear Trap
A false breakdown that shakes out sellers before price reverses up — the bull trap's mirror image.
Bid-Ask Spread
The gap between the highest buy offer and lowest sell offer — the invisible fee you pay on every trade.
Bitcoin Dominance
Bitcoin's share of total crypto market cap — the market's built-in risk-appetite dial, live in our ticker.
Bitcoin Halving
The programmed event every 210,000 blocks (~4 years) that cuts new Bitcoin issuance in half.
Blob Space (EIP-4844)
Dedicated low-cost data storage Ethereum added for rollups, sharply cutting Layer 2 fees.
Block
A batch of transactions written permanently to a blockchain, linked cryptographically to the block before it.
Block Explorer
A search engine for a blockchain — look up any address, transaction or block and see the public record.
Block Height
The sequential number of a block — the blockchain's built-in clock, counting up from block zero.
Block Reward
The new coins plus fees a miner or validator earns for adding a block — currently 3.125 BTC per Bitcoin block.
Blockchain
A shared digital ledger where transactions are recorded in linked blocks that are extremely difficult to alter.
Bollinger Bands
Volatility bands around a moving average that expand and contract with market turbulence.
Breakout
When price moves decisively beyond an established level or range — a trade setup that also generates costly fakes.
Bridge (Cross-Chain)
Infrastructure that moves assets between blockchains — essential plumbing with a history of nine-figure hacks.
Bull Market
A sustained period of rising prices and optimism, historically arriving in crypto roughly every four years — and ending in euphoria.
Bull Trap
A false rally that lures buyers in before resuming its decline — a classic bear-market whipsaw.
Buy the Dip (BTD)
The strategy — and rallying cry — of buying during price declines, on the bet that the uptrend resumes.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT)
A system's ability to reach agreement even when some participants fail or act maliciously — the core problem blockchains solve.
C
Call Option
The right to buy an asset at a set price — a leveraged, defined-risk way to bet on (or gain exposure to) upside.
Candlestick Chart
The standard price chart in trading: each candle shows open, high, low and close for a period at a glance.
Capitulation
A phase of panic selling where exhausted holders give up en masse — historically clustered near cycle bottoms.
CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency)
Government-issued digital money — sharing technology vocabulary with crypto but the opposite philosophy: centralized by design.
Centralized Exchange (CEX)
A company-operated trading platform that custodies your funds — the easiest on-ramp, and a counterparty risk to manage.
Chain Reorganization (Reorg)
When nodes abandon one version of recent blocks for a longer competing version — routine when brief, alarming when deep.
Chart Pattern
Recurring price formations (triangles, flags, head-and-shoulders) traders use to anticipate moves — with mixed evidence.
Circulating Supply
The number of coins actually available in the market — the denominator that makes or breaks a market cap comparison.
Coin Days Destroyed (CDD)
A metric that weights coin movements by how long they sat idle — surfacing when old, strong hands finally transact.
Coin vs Token
A coin is a blockchain's native asset; a token is built on top of someone else's chain — a distinction with real security implications.
CoinJoin
A Bitcoin privacy technique combining multiple users' payments into one transaction to obscure who paid whom.
Cold Wallet
A crypto wallet whose private keys never touch the internet — typically a hardware device used for long-term storage.
Collateral
Assets you lock to back a loan or position, forfeited if you can't repay — the trust substitute across all of DeFi.
Collateralization Ratio
The value of your locked collateral divided by your debt — the cushion that keeps a DeFi loan from being liquidated.
Collateralized Debt Position (CDP)
A vault where you lock crypto to mint a loan (often a stablecoin) against it — the mechanism behind DAI and similar assets.
Concentrated Liquidity
An AMM upgrade letting providers focus their capital in a chosen price range for far higher fee efficiency — at the cost of active management.
Confidential Transaction
A technique that hides a transaction's amount while still letting the network verify it's valid.
Consensus Mechanism
The rulebook by which thousands of independent computers agree on one version of the ledger without a referee.
Contango
When futures prices sit above the spot price — the normal state that signals bullish positioning and funds basis trades.
Correction
A sharp but ordinary pullback — in crypto, 10–30% drops routinely punctuate even the strongest uptrends.
Cost Basis
The price you originally paid for an asset — the anchor for both your tax bill and your psychology.
Cross Margin
A mode where your entire balance backs your positions — deeper protection against liquidation, but total exposure if it fails.
Cross-Chain Messaging
Infrastructure that lets smart contracts on different blockchains send verified instructions to each other.
Crypto Mixer (Tumbler)
A service that pools and shuffles funds to break the on-chain link between source and destination — legally fraught.
Crypto Taxes
Tax obligations on crypto activity — which in most jurisdictions treat disposals, not just cash-outs, as taxable events.
Crypto-Backed Stablecoin
A stablecoin collateralized by other crypto assets, over-collateralized to absorb volatility — DAI being the flagship.
Custodial vs Non-Custodial
Who holds the keys: a company (custodial) or you alone (non-custodial). Convenience versus sovereignty, with no third option.
D
DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)
An internet-native organization coordinated by token voting and smart contracts instead of managers and legal charters.
DApp (Decentralized Application)
An application whose backend runs on a blockchain — open to anyone with a wallet, no account creation required.
Data Availability
The guarantee that the data behind a transaction batch is actually published and retrievable — a subtle but critical security pillar.
DCA (Dollar-Cost Averaging)
Investing a fixed amount on a fixed schedule regardless of price — the strategy that removes timing (and emotion) from the equation.
Dead Cat Bounce
A brief recovery within a larger decline that fails and resumes falling — a temporary bounce, not a bottom.
Death Cross
When a short-term moving average crosses below a long-term one — the ominous-sounding bearish counterpart to the golden cross.
Decentralization
Distributing control so no single party can censor, alter or shut down a system — crypto's core promise, measured in degrees.
DeFi
Decentralized finance — lending, trading and earning yield through code-run protocols instead of banks or brokers.
Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)
A consensus variant where token holders vote for a small set of delegates to validate — fast, but more centralized.
Delta-Neutral
A position structured to have no directional exposure, earning yield or spread regardless of which way price moves.
DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure)
Token incentives applied to real-world hardware — crowd-built wireless, mapping, storage and compute networks.
Depth Chart
A visualization of the order book showing how much buy and sell liquidity sits at each price level.
DEX (Decentralized Exchange)
An exchange that is code, not a company: trade directly from your wallet against liquidity pools, no sign-up, no custodian.
Diamond Hands
Crypto slang for holding through extreme volatility without selling — conviction (or stubbornness) as a badge of honor.
Difficulty (Mining)
Bitcoin's self-adjusting dial that keeps blocks arriving every ~10 minutes no matter how much mining power joins or leaves.
Distribution
A phase where informed holders quietly sell into strength near a top, transferring coins to late buyers.
Divergence (Technical)
When price and a momentum indicator disagree — often read as an early hint the trend is weakening.
Dormancy
The average age of coins moved in a transaction — a lens on whether old or new coins are driving activity.
Double-Spending
Spending the same digital money twice — the problem that made digital cash impossible until Bitcoin solved it.
Drawdown
The percentage fall from peak to trough — the risk number that matters more than average returns.
Dust
Crypto amounts too small to be worth moving — and occasionally, tiny deposits sent by trackers or scammers.
E
Epoch
A fixed period used to organize a blockchain's operations — validator duties, reward cycles, and finality checkpoints.
ERC-20
The Ethereum token standard that made launching interchangeable tokens trivial — the DNA of most tokens on our screener.
EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)
The runtime that executes smart contracts on Ethereum — and the de facto standard cloned across dozens of chains.
EVM-Compatible
A blockchain that runs Ethereum's virtual machine, letting Ethereum apps and tools work with little or no changes.
Exchange Netflow
The net movement of coins onto or off exchanges — a widely-watched (if imperfect) proxy for buying and selling pressure.
Exit Liquidity
The latecomers whose buying lets earlier holders sell at high prices — a role you never want to unknowingly play.
F
FATF
The global body setting anti-money-laundering standards that shape crypto regulation worldwide.
Fiat Currency
Government-issued money backed by decree rather than a commodity — the dollars and euros crypto is priced in.
Fiat-Backed Stablecoin
A stablecoin backed 1:1 by cash and short-term government debt held in reserve — the dominant, and now regulated, model.
Fibonacci Retracement
Horizontal levels drawn from Fibonacci ratios, used to anticipate where a pullback might find support.
Finality
The point at which a transaction becomes irreversible — instant in some systems, probabilistic and gradual in others.
Flash Loan
An uncollateralized loan that must be borrowed and repaid within a single transaction — impossible in traditional finance, native to DeFi.
Flash Loan Attack
Exploiting a protocol by borrowing huge uncollateralized sums to manipulate prices or votes within one transaction.
Floor Price
The lowest asking price in an NFT collection — the entry cost, and the headline metric of a collection's value.
FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
The urge to buy because price is rising and everyone's talking about it — the emotion that funds every market top.
Fork (Hard & Soft)
A change to a blockchain's rules — backward-compatible (soft) or chain-splitting (hard), occasionally minting entirely new coins.
Fork-Choice Rule
The algorithm nodes use to pick the canonical chain when multiple valid versions exist.
Fraud Proof
Evidence submitted to prove an optimistic rollup transaction was invalid, clawing back incorrect state.
Front-Running
Placing a transaction ahead of a known pending one to profit from its expected price effect.
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)
Negative information — real or manufactured — that drives selling; crypto slang for bad news and bad-faith news alike.
Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV)
What a token would be worth if every future token existed today — the reality check for low-float launches.
Funding Arbitrage
Capturing perpetual funding payments while hedging out price risk — the delta-neutral yield trade at scale.
Funding Rate
Periodic payments between long and short traders that tether perpetual futures to spot price — and reveal crowd positioning.
Futures Contract
An agreement to buy or sell an asset at a set price on a future date — crypto's main leverage and hedging instrument.
G
GameFi
The blend of blockchain gaming and DeFi — aiming for player-owned assets and economies that outlast the play-to-earn bust.
Gas Fee
The fee paid to a blockchain network to process a transaction, which rises and falls with network demand.
Gas Limit
The maximum computational work you authorize a transaction to consume — a safety cap on complex operations.
Genesis Block
Block zero of a blockchain — Bitcoin's contains a newspaper headline that doubles as a mission statement.
GENIUS Act
The 2025 US federal law establishing rules for stablecoins — reserve backing, disclosure, and issuer compliance.
Golden Cross
When a short-term moving average crosses above a long-term one — a widely-cited bullish trend signal.
Governance Attack
Seizing enough voting power to pass a malicious proposal and drain a protocol — DeFi's hostile takeover.
Governance Proposal
A formal motion put to a DAO's token holders to change a protocol — the unit of on-chain decision-making.
Governance Token
A token that carries voting power over a protocol's parameters, treasury and future — shareholder democracy, on-chain.
Gwei
The unit gas fees are priced in on Ethereum — one billionth of an ETH.
H
Hash
A fixed-length digital fingerprint of any data — change one character and the fingerprint changes completely.
Hash Rate
Total computational power securing a Proof-of-Work network — Bitcoin's is the largest computing effort ever assembled.
HD Wallet (Hierarchical Deterministic)
A wallet that generates unlimited addresses from a single seed phrase — the standard behind modern crypto wallets.
Health Factor
A single number summarizing how close a DeFi loan is to liquidation — above 1 is safe, at 1 you're liquidated.
HODL
Crypto slang for holding an asset through volatility instead of trading — born from a famous 2013 forum typo.
HODL Waves
A visualization banding the supply by how long coins have been held — showing the tug-of-war between old and new holders.
Hot Wallet
A crypto wallet connected to the internet — convenient for daily use, exposed by definition.
Howey Test
The US legal test for whether an asset is a security — central to nearly every crypto regulatory battle.
I
ICO (Initial Coin Offering)
Crowdfunding by token sale — the 2017 boom that raised billions, minted a few giants, and taught regulators everything.
Impermanent Loss
The hidden cost of providing liquidity: when pooled assets diverge in price, you end up worth less than if you'd simply held.
Implied Volatility (IV)
The market's forecast of future price movement, embedded in options prices — high when fear or excitement runs hot.
Insurance Fund
A reserve a protocol or exchange keeps to absorb bad debt or liquidation shortfalls before users take losses.
Interest Rate Model
The formula a lending protocol uses to set borrowing and lending rates from pool utilization.
Interoperability
The ability of separate blockchains to communicate and transact — the multi-chain world's central technical challenge.
IPFS
A decentralized file-storage protocol widely used to host NFT images and metadata off-chain.
Isolated Margin
A mode that confines a position's risk to the margin assigned to it, protecting the rest of your account.
K
L
Layer 1 (L1)
A base blockchain with its own consensus and security — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana — the foundation everything else builds on.
Layer 2 (L2)
Networks that process transactions cheaply off the main chain while inheriting its security — Ethereum's chosen path to scale.
Lending Protocol
DeFi's money markets: deposit assets to earn interest, or borrow against collateral — all governed by code, no bank.
Leverage
Trading with borrowed funds to multiply exposure — and the speed at which accounts reach zero.
Lightning Network
Bitcoin's Layer 2 payment network using state channels for instant, near-free micropayments.
Limit Order
An order that executes only at your specified price or better — patience as a fee discount.
Liquid Staking
Staking your coins while receiving a tradable token representing them — keeping liquidity you'd otherwise lock up.
Liquid Staking Token (LST)
A tradable token representing staked assets plus their accruing rewards — stETH being the best-known example.
Liquidation
The forced closure of a leveraged position when losses approach your collateral — often cascading into market-wide moves.
Liquidation Threshold
The collateral-to-debt level at which a lending protocol force-sells your collateral to repay the loan.
Liquidity
How easily an asset can be bought or sold without moving its price — deep liquidity means tighter, safer trading.
Liquidity Grab (Stop Hunt)
A sharp move through an obvious level to trigger clustered stop-losses, before price reverses the other way.
Liquidity Pool
A smart-contract vault of paired tokens that lets DEXs price and execute swaps without order books.
Liquidity Provider (LP)
Someone who deposits assets into a pool so others can trade against them, earning a share of fees — and taking on impermanent loss.
Long Position
Betting an asset's price will rise — the default stance of buying and holding, amplified when leveraged.
Long-Term Holder (LTH)
On-chain cohort of coins unmoved for ~155+ days — the 'strong hands' whose behavior often marks cycle turns.
LP Token
A receipt token proving your share of a liquidity pool — redeemable for your deposit plus accrued fees, and usable elsewhere in DeFi.
M
MACD
A momentum indicator built from moving-average differences, used to spot trend shifts and momentum changes.
Mainnet
A blockchain's live production network with real value at stake — as opposed to test networks with worthless tokens.
Maker-Taker Fees
A fee structure that rewards adding liquidity (maker) and charges removing it (taker) — shaping how pros place orders.
Margin
Collateral posted to open a leveraged position — the deposit that controls a much larger exposure.
Margin Call
A demand to add collateral when a leveraged position's losses approach your margin — ignore it and you're liquidated.
Market Cap
A coin's price multiplied by its circulating supply — the standard way to compare the size of crypto assets.
Market Maker
A participant that continuously quotes both buy and sell prices, providing liquidity and earning the spread.
Market Order
An order that executes immediately at the best available price — you pay for speed with the spread and slippage.
Mean Reversion
The tendency of price to return toward an average after extremes — the logic behind fading overextended moves.
Meme Coin
A token whose product is the joke and the crowd — pure attention markets with lottery-ticket math.
Mempool
The waiting room of unconfirmed transactions, where fee bidding decides who gets into the next block.
MEV (Maximal Extractable Value)
Profit extracted by reordering, inserting or censoring transactions within blocks — an invisible tax on DeFi trading.
MiCA
The European Union's comprehensive crypto regulation — one of the world's first full frameworks for the industry.
Miner Capitulation
When unprofitable miners shut down and sell reserves en masse — historically a marker of deep cycle lows.
Mining
The competitive computation that secures Proof-of-Work chains and mints new coins — an industrial energy business.
Mining Pool
Miners combining hash power to earn steady proportional payouts instead of rare jackpot blocks.
Minting
Creating new tokens or NFTs on a blockchain — the on-chain act of bringing a digital asset into existence.
Modular Blockchain
An architecture splitting a blockchain's jobs — execution, settlement, consensus, data — across specialized layers.
Money Market (DeFi)
A pooled market for short-term lending and borrowing of crypto at algorithmic interest rates.
Moving Average (MA)
A smoothed average of price over a set period — the workhorse that filters noise to reveal trend.
Multi-Party Computation (MPC)
A cryptographic technique that splits a private key across parties so no single one ever holds it whole.
Multisig (Multi-Signature)
A wallet requiring multiple keys to sign — eliminating single points of failure for treasuries and serious holdings.
MVRV Ratio
Market cap divided by realized cap — a cycle gauge showing whether holders are, on average, in heavy profit or deep loss.
N
Nakamoto Consensus
Bitcoin's consensus design: the longest valid chain wins, with security from proof-of-work and probabilistic finality.
NFT (Non-Fungible Token)
A unique on-chain token proving ownership of a specific item — art, game assets, domains, tickets — beyond the 2021 mania.
NFT Metadata
The data describing an NFT — its image link, name, and traits — often stored off-chain, with implications for permanence.
NFT Royalties
Ongoing payments to a creator on secondary sales of their NFT — a promise that proved hard to enforce.
Node
A computer running a blockchain's software, independently validating every rule — the physical substance of decentralization.
Nonce
A per-account counter ensuring transactions execute in order and can't be replayed — and a mining variable in Bitcoin.
NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss)
The share of total market value sitting in unrealized profit versus loss — a color-coded map of market euphoria and despair.
NVT Ratio
Network value divided by on-chain transaction volume — crypto's rough analog of a price-to-earnings ratio.
O
OFAC Sanctions
US Treasury sanctions that now reach crypto addresses, obligating platforms to block designated wallets.
On-Chain Analysis
Reading the blockchain's public ledger — flows, holder behavior, dormancy — as a fundamental data source no other asset class offers.
Open Interest
The total value of outstanding derivatives contracts — a gauge of how much leverage is riding on the market.
Optimistic Rollup
A rollup that assumes transactions are valid unless challenged within a dispute window — the model behind Arbitrum and Base.
Options Contract
The right, not obligation, to buy or sell at a set price — used for hedging, income, and defined-risk speculation.
Oracle
The bridge feeding real-world data (prices, events) into smart contracts — and a single point of failure when it breaks.
Order Book
The live list of all buy and sell orders at each price — the ledger of supply and demand on a trading venue.
OTC (Over-the-Counter) Trading
Large trades negotiated privately off-exchange, so whales can move size without moving the ticker.
Over-Collateralization
Locking up more value than you borrow — DeFi's substitute for credit checks, and the reason its loans are trustless.
P
Paper Hands
Slang for selling too early out of fear — the derided opposite of diamond hands.
Peg
A fixed target value an asset is designed to track — most commonly a stablecoin's $1, held by reserves or mechanism.
Perpetual Futures (Perps)
Futures with no expiry date, kept aligned to spot by funding payments — by far crypto's most-traded derivative.
Pig Butchering Scam
Long-con romance-investment fraud: weeks of trust-building, a fake trading platform, then the slaughter.
Play-to-Earn (P2E)
A gaming model where players earn crypto or NFTs with real value — briefly explosive, then largely unsustainable.
Ponzi Scheme
A fraud paying old investors with new investors' money — a structure many high-yield crypto 'projects' quietly replicate.
Price Impact
How much your own trade moves the market price against you — distinct from slippage, and larger in thin pools.
Private Key
The secret code that controls a crypto wallet. Whoever holds it owns the funds — lose it and they are gone.
Proof of Authority (PoA)
A consensus model where a few known, approved validators secure the chain — efficient, but trusted rather than trustless.
Proof of History (PoH)
Solana's innovation of cryptographically timestamping events to order transactions before consensus — enabling high speed.
Proof of Reserves
Cryptographic or audited evidence that an exchange actually holds the customer assets it claims — a post-FTX standard.
Proof of Stake (PoS)
Consensus secured by validators' locked capital: honest work earns yield, cheating gets your stake destroyed.
Proof of Work (PoW)
Consensus secured by verifiable expended energy — Bitcoin's original design, where rewriting history costs more than it pays.
Protocol-Owned Liquidity
When a protocol owns its own trading liquidity instead of renting it from mercenary farmers — solving DeFi's rented-capital problem.
Public Key
The shareable half of a cryptographic key pair, from which your wallet address is derived — safe to publish.
Puell Multiple
Miner revenue compared to its yearly average — a cycle indicator built around miner selling pressure.
Pump and Dump
Coordinated buying to inflate a thin token's price, dumped on the outsiders who chase the candle.
Put Option
The right to sell an asset at a set price — crypto's insurance policy against a crash.
Q
R
Range-Bound
A market oscillating between a floor and ceiling without a clear trend — where breakout strategies bleed and mean-reversion works.
Real World Assets (RWA)
Traditional assets — T-bills, credit, funds — issued as on-chain tokens; institutional finance's actual crypto adoption story.
Real Yield
Returns paid from a protocol's actual fee revenue rather than from freshly printed tokens — the sustainable kind.
Realized Capitalization
Market cap recalculated using each coin's last-moved price instead of the current price — a measure of real capital invested.
Realized Price
The average price at which all coins last moved on-chain — the market's aggregate cost basis.
Rebase Token
A token whose supply automatically expands or contracts, changing your balance count while targeting a price or yield.
Reentrancy Attack
A classic smart-contract exploit where a malicious contract repeatedly re-enters a function before it finishes updating.
Reserve Attestation
A third-party report verifying a stablecoin issuer actually holds the reserves it claims — trust, but verified.
Restaking
Reusing staked ETH's security to protect additional protocols for extra yield — with correlated slashing risk attached.
Ring Signature
A privacy technique that signs a transaction on behalf of a group, hiding which member actually authorized it.
Rollup
A Layer 2 that processes transactions off-chain in bulk, then posts compressed proof to the base chain — Ethereum's core scaling strategy.
RSI (Relative Strength Index)
A 0–100 momentum oscillator flagging when an asset may be overbought or oversold.
Rug Pull
Insiders draining a token's liquidity or minting supply and vanishing — DeFi's signature exit scam.
S
Sandwich Attack
A form of MEV where a bot trades just before and after your swap, pocketing the price move it forces you into.
Satoshi (Unit)
Bitcoin's smallest unit — one hundred-millionth of a coin — named for its creator.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, vanished since 2011, leaving ~1M untouched coins and no authority to appeal to.
Security Token
A token that legally represents a regulated financial security — bringing traditional assets on-chain under securities law.
Seed Phrase (Recovery Phrase)
The 12–24 words that regenerate every key in your wallet — whoever holds them holds the money, forever.
Seigniorage
The profit an issuer earns from creating money — in crypto, the yield stablecoin issuers make on their reserves.
Sell Wall / Buy Wall
A large cluster of orders at one price in the order book — real support/resistance, or a bluff meant to be seen.
Sequencer
The component that orders and batches a rollup's transactions — often centralized today, and a key risk to understand.
Settlement Layer
The base blockchain where transactions achieve final, authoritative settlement — the bedrock of a modular stack.
Sharding
Splitting a blockchain's workload across parallel segments so the network scales without every node doing everything.
Short Position
Betting an asset's price will fall — borrowing to sell high and buy back lower, with theoretically unlimited risk.
Short Squeeze
A rapid price surge that forces shorts to buy back, fueling an even sharper spike — reflexive upside violence.
Short-Term Holder (STH)
On-chain cohort of recently-acquired coins (held under ~155 days) — the reactive, volatile hands that drive tops.
Sidechain
An independent blockchain connected to a main chain by a bridge, with its own security — related to but distinct from a rollup.
SIM Swap Attack
Hijacking your phone number to intercept SMS codes and reset your accounts — why texting is the weakest 2FA.
Slashing
The penalty in Proof of Stake where a misbehaving validator's staked collateral is partially destroyed.
Slippage
The gap between the price you expected and the price you got — the cost of moving size through thin liquidity.
Smart Contract
A program stored on a blockchain that executes automatically when its conditions are met.
Smart Contract Audit
A professional security review of a protocol's code before (and after) launch — necessary, but never a guarantee.
Snapshot Voting
Off-chain, gasless governance voting that records token holdings at a set block — the DAO governance workhorse.
Solidity
The dominant programming language for Ethereum smart contracts — powerful, and unforgiving of bugs.
SOPR (Spent Output Profit Ratio)
Whether coins moving on-chain today are being sold at a profit or a loss, in aggregate — a real-time sentiment read.
Soulbound Token (SBT)
A non-transferable token representing credentials or identity — reputation you can't buy or sell.
Spoofing
Placing large fake orders to manipulate price perception, then canceling before they execute — an illegal-in-stocks tactic common in crypto.
Spot Bitcoin ETF
Regulated funds holding real Bitcoin, tradable in any brokerage account since January 2024 — the pipe connecting Wall Street to crypto.
Spot Trading
Buying and selling the actual asset for immediate settlement — no leverage, no expiry, no liquidation.
Stablecoin
A cryptocurrency designed to hold a fixed value, usually pegged 1:1 to the US dollar.
Stablecoin Depeg
When a stablecoin trades away from its $1 promise — from routine wobble to death spiral, the stress test that reveals design.
Stableswap
An AMM curve tuned for assets meant to trade near 1:1, minimizing slippage between stablecoins and pegged pairs.
Staking
Locking coins to secure a Proof-of-Stake network in exchange for yield — real rewards with real conditions attached.
State Channel
A Layer 2 technique letting parties transact off-chain instantly and settle the final result on-chain — the idea behind Lightning.
Stealth Address
A privacy method generating a fresh one-time address for each payment, so a recipient's activity can't be linked.
Stock-to-Flow (S2F)
A scarcity model valuing an asset by existing supply divided by annual new production — famous, and famously contested.
Stop-Loss Order
An order that triggers a sale once price falls to your line — discipline automated, with gaps and wicks as the fine print.
Supply in Profit
The percentage of all coins whose last-moved price is below the current price — a broad profit-and-loss thermometer.
Support and Resistance
Price levels where buying or selling has repeatedly clustered — technical analysis's most fundamental concept.
T
Tax-Loss Harvesting
Selling losing positions to realize losses that offset gains, reducing your tax bill — with crypto-specific quirks.
Testnet
A blockchain's rehearsal network with valueless tokens — where developers break things so mainnet doesn't.
The Merge
Ethereum's 2022 transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake — one of crypto's largest engineering feats.
Token Burn
Permanently destroying tokens by sending them to an unspendable address, reducing supply — sometimes meaningfully, often as marketing.
Token Gating
Restricting access to content, communities, or features to holders of a specific token or NFT.
Tokenized Stocks
Blockchain tokens mirroring real equities for 24/7 global trading — 2026's fastest-moving bridge between markets.
Tokenomics
A token's economic design — supply, emissions, unlocks, utility, value capture — the spreadsheet under the story.
Total Supply
All coins currently existing (minus burned) — including locked and vesting tokens not yet on the market.
Trading Volume
Value traded over a period — the liquidity pulse that validates (or exposes) a price move.
Travel Rule
A regulation requiring crypto firms to share sender and recipient information for transfers above a threshold.
Trend Line
A straight line connecting successive highs or lows to visualize a trend's direction and slope.
TVL (Total Value Locked)
The dollar value deposited in a DeFi protocol — adoption's headline metric, with well-known distortions.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
A second lock on your accounts beyond the password — use an app or hardware key, never SMS, for anything holding crypto.
U
Utility Token
A token meant to provide access or function within a product — and the label projects use to argue they're not securities.
Utilization Rate
The share of a lending pool currently borrowed — the dial that sets interest rates and signals liquidity stress.
UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output)
Bitcoin's accounting model: your balance is a set of discrete unspent 'coins,' not a single running total.
V
Validator
A staked network participant that proposes and attests blocks in Proof of Stake — rewarded for uptime, slashed for cheating.
Validity Proof
A cryptographic proof that a batch of transactions is correct, used by zk-rollups to guarantee integrity upfront.
Vault (DeFi)
An automated strategy contract that takes your deposit and farms yield on your behalf, rebalancing so you don't have to.
Vesting (Token Unlocks)
Scheduled release of locked team/investor tokens — the supply calendar that quietly prices many charts.
Volatility
The size of price swings — crypto's defining trait, the source of both its returns and its wreckage.
Vote-Escrow (veTokens)
Locking governance tokens for a fixed period to gain amplified, time-weighted voting power — aligning voters with the long term.
VWAP (Volume-Weighted Average Price)
The average price weighted by volume over a period — a benchmark for execution quality and intraday fair value.
W
Wallet
The tool that holds your keys and signs your transactions — the coins themselves never leave the blockchain.
Wallet Drainer
Malicious code that empties wallets through deceptive signatures — one approval, everything gone.
Wash Trading
Fake trading against oneself to inflate volume and create an illusion of activity — rampant on low-quality venues.
Web3
The umbrella vision of an internet with user-owned assets and identity built on blockchains — part architecture, part marketing.
Whale
A holder large enough to move markets — tracked obsessively on-chain, mimicked at your own risk.
Whitepaper
A project's founding technical document — Bitcoin's nine pages set the template; most successors are marketing wearing a lab coat.
Wrapped Token
A token representing another asset on a foreign chain — like WBTC, Bitcoin's passport to Ethereum — with custodian risk included.
Y
Z
Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)
Proving a statement true without revealing the underlying data — the cryptography scaling and privatizing blockchains.
ZK-Rollup
A rollup that cryptographically proves every batch is valid before posting it — instant finality, no dispute window.
zk-SNARK
A compact zero-knowledge proof that's fast to verify — the cryptography powering many privacy coins and zk-rollups.
zk-STARK
A zero-knowledge proof that needs no trusted setup and resists quantum attacks — more scalable, larger proofs than SNARKs.