A network where nodes talk to each other directly instead of through a single server.

A protocol for trading future yield separately from principal by wrapping yield-bearing positions into standardized yield tokens and splitting their economic rights into dated principal and yield tokens.

China's central bank and the issuer of the digital yuan.

A DLT where only approved nodes validate. Common in bank and enterprise pilots, unlike public permissionless chains.

A futures contract with no expiry. Funding payments keep it near the spot index.

The postwar habit of invoicing oil in dollars, the backdrop for petroyuan and de-dollarization talk.

Tricking you into signing a bad transaction or handing over a seed via fake sites, DMs, or ads.

The romance-investment scam pattern that funnels victims into fake crypto platforms.

Brazil's instant-payment system, often cited in BRICS and CBDC conversations as a public rail.

Games that pay tokens for play. Often collapse when token emissions outrun new player demand.

A Layer-0 relay chain that shares security with parachains and uses XCM for messaging.

An Ethereum scaling stack best known for the Polygon PoS sidechain and later zk proof systems.

The leading crypto prediction market, built on Polygon and later expanded.

A cryptographic commitment to a polynomial that lets a prover substantiate selected evaluations without sending the entire polynomial.

Returns paid mainly from new capital rather than productive cash flow. Many farms drift here.

A public write-up of what failed after an incident. Quality varies. Demand one.

An assurance about a transaction's expected inclusion, ordering, or execution given before the blockchain's ordinary confirmation or finality process completes.

A market that trades event outcomes. Prices are read as implied probabilities.

How much a trade itself moves the mid price, separate from the standing spread.

A feed that tells contracts the reference price of an asset. Bad oracles cause bad liquidations.

The ability to inspect original records, identify what they actually establish, and distinguish evidence from interpretation or promotion.

A firm that packages custody, leverage, settlement, and OTC for funds so they do not juggle ten exchange logins.

A conflict that can arise when a delegate has different incentives or information from the party on whose behalf it acts.

A privacy protocol that can prove a withdrawal belongs to a selected set of deposits without publicly identifying the specific deposit.

A secret number that authorizes spends. If it leaks, the address is compromised.

A BIS-led exploration of cross-border payments using tokenized commercial-bank deposits and central-bank money on a shared programmable platform.

A BIS Innovation Hub experiment on a shared platform for cross-border settlement using multiple central-bank digital currencies.

A multi-CBDC cross-border payment project developed with central-bank partners; the BIS announced its handover to those partners in October 2024.

A BIS initiative to connect domestic instant payment systems through a standardized model for cross-border payments.

Consensus run by a known, permissioned set of validators. Fast, centralized, common on sidechains.

A cryptographic demonstration about a committed set of obligations, often allowing customers to verify inclusion of their balances; its assurance depends on completeness, valuation and the surrounding accounting process.

A scheme to show a wallet is one human, used to fight airdrop farming and bots.

Evidence about a custodian's reserve assets at a specified time and within a stated scope; it does not alone establish full solvency.

A cryptographic storage-auditing protocol whose security definition connects a prover's ability to answer challenges with the ability to recover the stored data.

Consensus where validators lock tokens as collateral to propose and attest blocks. Used by Ethereum.

Consensus where miners expend computation to propose blocks. Used by Bitcoin.

Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction. A wallet-exchange format for hardware signers and multisig.

An experimental model in which participants choose contributions to a shared benefit, used to study cooperation and free riding.

The counterpart to a private key. Addresses are usually a hashed or encoded form of the public key.

The payee debits the payer under a mandate, as with many card and ACH debit flows.

A coordinated hype cycle that lifts a thin token so insiders can sell into the rush.

A Solana launchpad that lets anyone spin up a bonding-curve memecoin and graduate it to a DEX pool.