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LEO$8.99+0.72%From your first block to the finer details. Explore the ideas, people, and systems behind the market—one useful explanation at a time.
Follow a transaction from a key to a shared ledger.
Begin with BlockchainExplore contracts, liquidity, borrowing and the risks between them.
Begin with Smart contractUnderstand what a price, valuation or sentiment indicator can tell you.
Begin with Market capitalizationLearn custody, permissions and how to assess what you sign.
Begin with Hardware walletConnect the original ideas to the incidents that changed the industry.
Begin with A Cypherpunk's ManifestoSeparate technical standards, issuer claims and legal frameworks.
Begin with Howey testAn encoding that avoids lookalike characters, used by legacy Bitcoin addresses and many other chains.
A checksummed address encoding used by Bitcoin SegWit and Taproot (bc1...) and by some other chains.
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. The design-doc process for Bitcoin protocol, wallet, and process changes.
Hierarchical deterministic wallets. One seed derives a tree of keys so backups stay simple.
The Bitcoin specification for a particular Schnorr signature scheme over secp256k1, used with Taproot spending.
The word-list standard for mnemonic seeds used by most wallets.
A derivation-path convention so the same seed can produce keys for many coins in a predictable tree.
The separate fee market for EIP-4844 blobs, distinct from regular gas.
A central bank digital currency. A digital liability of the central bank, not a commercial-bank deposit and not Bitcoin.
Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, which burns and mints native USDC instead of wrapping it.
A large-value U.S. dollar netting system used by banks for many international USD payments.
The nested-account model banks use to pay across borders when they do not hold accounts with each other.
Ethereum Improvement Proposal. The design-doc process for Ethereum core, networking, and standards (ERCs).
Ethereum's fee market: a burned base fee plus a tip. It made fees more predictable and added a burn.
Proto-danksharding. Added blob space so rollups can post data far cheaper than calldata.
Typed structured data signing, the standard behind readable wallet prompts for permits and orders.
An Ethereum transaction mechanism that lets an externally owned account authorize persistent delegation to executable code, introduced through Pectra in 2025.
A multi-token standard that can hold fungible and non-fungible ids in one contract.
An Ethereum interface allowing a smart contract account to report whether it considers a given message signature valid.
An Ethereum interface standard for fungible token contracts, covering balances, transfers, allowances, and events.
The permit standard so an ERC-20 approval can be signed off-chain and submitted with a swap.
A permissioned token standard family used for compliant security-token transfers (identity and eligibility checks).
The account-abstraction standard that adds user operations, bundlers, and paymasters without changing Ethereum consensus.
A vault standard so yield-bearing shares (like lending receipts) share one deposit and redeem interface.
A standard vocabulary of custom error types for common ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 token failures.
Token-bound accounts. An NFT can own assets and initiate transactions like a wallet.
The Ethereum standard for non-fungible tokens, where each token id is unique.
Arbitrary data written into Bitcoin witness space and bound to a satoshi by Ordinals theory.
A global standard for richer financial messages used by payments, securities, and FX. Several crypto networks market ISO 20022 compatibility for bank rails.
The international codes for currencies (USD, EUR, XAU). Crypto tickers are informal and are not ISO 4217 assignments.
The messaging standard many Travel Rule vendors use between VASPs.
The interVASP messaging standard that encodes originator and beneficiary data for the Travel Rule.
Bitcoin's 2017 capacity and malleability fix. Addresses start with 3 or bc1.
A Bitcoin address scheme that lets a receiver publish one static code without address reuse.
A non-transferable token used for credentials, reputation, or identity, still experimental.
Solana's fungible token standard, analogous to ERC-20 on Ethereum.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The messaging network banks use to instruct cross-border payments, now migrating many flows to ISO 20022.
Token for Regulated EXchanges. An earlier security-token framework associated with Tokeny, related to ERC-3643 lineage.
A Bitcoin upgrade that improved privacy and scripting, used by Ordinals and many modern spends.
The Eurosystem RTGS for euro central-bank money.
TARGET Instant Payment Settlement, the ECB's instant euro rail.
Solana's extended token program with transfer hooks, fees, and other features.
Definitions offer a starting point. Detailed readings include the sources behind the explanation.