The leading oracle network for prices, proofs, and cross-chain messages (CCIP).

Ethereum co-founder who later launched Cardano.

A large-value U.S. dollar netting system used by banks for many international USD payments.

China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System for yuan clearing.

The issuer of USDC, a regulated dollar stablecoin reserved in cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries.

An automatic pause when flows or losses exceed thresholds.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, H.R.3633, a U.S. House-origin market-structure bill with subsequent Senate consideration.

Bankruptcy tool to recover preferential withdrawals from customers who got out before the freeze.

Continuous Linked Settlement, the traditional FX PvP utility for major currencies.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which lists cash-settled Bitcoin and ether futures used by institutions.

A U.S.-listed centralized exchange and custodian, also a prime broker and the issuer path for coinbase-wrapped assets like cbETH.

Theft of NEM from the Japanese exchange Coincheck, one of the largest exchange losses of that era.

A long-running crypto news site, historically linked to industry events like Consensus.

A wallet whose keys stay offline, often on a hardware device or paper backup, used for longer-term storage.

Assets locked to back a loan or a minted stablecoin. If the value falls too far, the position is liquidated.

Mixing client funds with firm trading inventory. Core allegation pattern in FTX and a standing CeFi red flag.

A decentralized lending protocol with version-specific market designs; Compound III markets use one borrowable base asset and a set of approved collateral assets with separate risk limits.

In common Bitcoin usage, inclusion in a block gives one confirmation, and each subsequent block on the accepted chain adds another.

An Ethereum-focused company that builds MetaMask, Infura, and institutional Ethereum tooling.

The x * y = k rule used by Uniswap v2-style pools. Larger trades pay a steeper price.

When futures trade above spot. Long-futures products bleed as they roll.

An institutional digital asset infrastructure provider offering custody, settlement, and collateral-related services.

How two prices move together. In stress, many alts correlate near 1 with Bitcoin.

The nested-account model banks use to pay across borders when they do not hold accounts with each other.

The chance the other side of a trade, loan, or custody arrangement cannot pay or deliver.

Permission for another address to borrow against borrowing capacity provided by a collateralized account, subject to the lending protocol's rules.

Bundled custody, leverage, and execution for funds, closer to TradFi prime than to retail CEX accounts.

A multi-year drawdown after a mania, as in 2018 and 2022.

Math that protects confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Blockchains rely on hashes and signatures.

A 2017 Ethereum NFT game that clogged the network and proved consumer demand for on-chain collectibles.

Larva Labs' 10,000-pixel characters on Ethereum that defined NFT profile culture and blue-chip collectible pricing.

A currency transaction report for large cash moves. Crypto analogs appear as threshold transfer reports.

An automated market maker protocol whose StableSwap pools concentrate liquidity around a reference price relationship, with other pool designs such as CryptoSwap serving assets whose relative prices move.

Who holds the keys. A custodian can move funds on a client's behalf and takes operational and legal responsibility.

The 1990s privacy-and-crypto mailing-list culture that influenced Bitcoin's design goals.

Binance's founder, a central figure in exchange history who later faced U.S. legal outcomes.

A crypto-collateralized dollar stablecoin originally minted by Maker vaults, now part of the Sky/Maker family.

A decentralized autonomous organization. On-chain votes steer a treasury and parameters, with very uneven real-world standing.

A decentralized application whose backend logic runs in smart contracts and whose users keep their own keys.

A private venue where size can trade without showing the full order to the public book first.

Checking randomly selected pieces of encoded block data to gain confidence that enough data is available for reconstruction without downloading every piece.

Efforts by some states to invoice trade, hold reserves, or settle payments outside the U.S. dollar.

Multiple controls: audits, monitoring, limits, timelocks, and circuit breakers together.

Decentralized finance. Lending, trading, and derivatives run by contracts instead of a single broker.

Deceiving a user into authorizing account delegation to code that can exercise unintended control over the account.

An option's sensitivity to a $1 move in the underlying. Market makers hedge delta by trading spot or futures.

Using a dedicated machine or phone for signing and a different one for browsing CT.

A decentralized identifier, a W3C-style id that can resolve to keys without a central registry.

The rebranded Libra project under the Diem Association. Wound down after failing to win U.S. regulatory clearance; talent later seeded Aptos and related efforts.

The Bank of Russia's central-bank digital currency, with broader public availability through participating banks announced for September 1, 2026.

A proof, created with a private key, that a specific message was authorized by the key holder.

China's retail CBDC issued by the People's Bank of China, used for domestic payments and pilots.

A shared database replicated across many machines, of which a blockchain is one design.

Distributed ledger technology. The broader category that includes blockchains and other shared ledgers.

Terraform Labs co-founder, central figure of the LUNA/UST collapse and later legal pursuit.

The original memecoin, a Litecoin/Bitcoin-family proof-of-work coin that became a cultural and payments token.

A candle whose open and close are nearly equal, often read as indecision.

Buying a fixed amount on a schedule so entry price averages across many days instead of one moment.

Binding a cryptographic message to a specific application, protocol, network, or purpose so that matching data is not confused across contexts.

The EU Digital Operational Resilience Act, which sets cyber and outsourcing rules for financial entities including many CASPs.

Attempting to spend the same coins in two conflicting transactions. Consensus exists to make this fail.

The peak-to-trough decline of a price or portfolio, a core measure of pain and risk.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the U.S. post-trade utility that clears and settles most American securities.

Delivery versus payment. Asset and cash move together, a goal for tokenized securities systems.

Delivery versus payment. Simultaneous exchange of securities and cash to cut settlement risk.

Bearer Chaumian mints for private small payments, often Lightning-connected. Mint trust is the tradeoff.

A restaking protocol that lets participants allocate staked economic value to additional services, with service-specific operators, rewards, and slashing conditions beyond ordinary Ethereum validation.

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.

An Ethereum transaction mechanism that lets an externally owned account authorize persistent delegation to executable code, introduced through Pectra in 2025.

2021 legal-tender experiment for Bitcoin, plus government accumulation and IMF negotiation drama.

A crypto compliance and blockchain analytics company.

The family of curves (secp256k1, Ed25519) used by most chains to make compact public keys and signatures.

A high-profile 2017 to 2018 smart-contract project that raised a record ICO and later faded from leadership.

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 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 vault-accounting attack in which manipulation of assets per share and rounding can cause a depositor to receive too few shares.

A standard vocabulary of custom error types for common ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 token failures.

The Ethereum standard for non-fungible tokens, where each token id is unique.

An exchange-traded fund. Spot Bitcoin and ether ETFs hold the asset and trade as shares on stock venues.

The leading smart-contract platform. A proof-of-stake chain that hosts DeFi, NFTs, and most L2 settlement.

The chain that rejected the DAO bailout fork and kept the original Ethereum history.

The Prague-Electra Ethereum upgrade activated in May 2025, combining execution-layer and consensus-layer changes including EIP-7702 account delegation.

Exchange-traded product, the umbrella that includes ETFs, ETNs, and some trusts.

The central bank of the euro area, developing a digital euro and supervising euro stablecoin issues under MiCA with national authorities.

Actors posing as MetaMask, Ledger, or exchange support in DMs. Real support never needs your seed.

The Financial Action Task Force. The intergovernmental body whose recommendations drive AML and Travel Rule rules worldwide.