A derivative whose profit or loss changes proportionally with the underlying price change for a fixed position size, before fees and funding.

A Linux Foundation umbrella organization for open-source distributed ledger, identity, and related trust technologies, incorporating the Hyperledger ecosystem.

Additional collateral a liquidator may receive when repaying an unhealthy loan, intended to make liquidation economically worthwhile.

How easily size can be traded without moving the price much. Deep books and pools mean better liquidity.

Thick books and pools absorb size. Thin liquidity turns small sells into crashes.

A smart-contract reserve of two or more tokens that enables automated trading and earns fees for depositors.

An early Bitcoin fork that uses Scrypt proof of work and is often treated as a payments side-bet to Bitcoin.

A protocol for requesting a Lightning payment invoice from a service through an encoded URL-based interaction.

A position that profits if price rises.

Loan to value. Debt divided by collateral. DeFi liquidations fire when LTV exceeds a threshold.

The May 2022 death spiral of TerraUSD and LUNA that erased tens of billions and seeded the CeFi credit crunch.

A trend-following oscillator built from two moving averages and their difference.

The collateralized stablecoin system behind Dai and the predecessor of the Sky ecosystem, with vault debt accounting, stability fees, liquidation mechanisms, and governance-controlled risk parameters.

Collateral posted to open and maintain a leveraged position.

Circulating supply multiplied by current price. The primary ranking metric for crypto assets.

An instruction to buy or sell immediately at the best available prices.

How spot, perps, ETFs, and OTC desks interact to set price.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore, a major licensing venue for crypto and digital-asset service providers in Asia.

A card network that partners with crypto issuers and on-ramps for card-linked spend.

An asset used to buy goods. Lightning and stablecoins compete for this role more than raw BTC for many users.

A token whose value is driven primarily by community attention rather than utility.

The single hash at the top of a Merkle tree, stored in a block header as a compact commitment to every transaction.

A binary tree of hashes that lets a verifier prove a transaction is in a block without downloading the whole block.

The most widely used EVM browser wallet, built by Consensys.

Maximal extractable value. Profit from choosing the order of transactions in a block, including arb and sandwiches.

Markets in Crypto-Assets, the EU regulation that licenses crypto issuers and service providers and sets rules for stablecoins.

A MiCA category for a crypto-asset that seeks to maintain a stable value by referencing one official currency.

A software company that became a leveraged public proxy for Bitcoin by holding a large BTC treasury.

The midpoint between best bid and ask, a common fair-value reference.

A participant in proof of work that expends energy to find a valid block nonce and collect the reward.

A service that pools and shuffles coins to hide the link between sender and receiver. Heavily sanctioned and prosecuted.

An ordered word-based encoding used in wallet recovery; BIP-39 mnemonics encode entropy and a checksum before a separate step derives the wallet seed.

A privacy coin that hides amounts and addresses with ring signatures and stealth addresses.

A state-licensed business that transmits value for customers. Many U.S. exchanges hold these licenses.

Morpho's permissionless lending-market design in which individual markets have fixed core parameters and separate accounting.

A smoothed average of recent closes, used as a trend filter rather than a forecast.

Multi-party computation custody that splits signing so no single machine holds a full key.

An early dominant Bitcoin exchange that collapsed in 2014 after a massive loss of customer BTC.

The longest or heaviest-chain rule introduced by Bitcoin. Probabilistic finality, open miner set.

Net asset value. The per-share value of a fund's holdings, used to judge ETF premiums and discounts.

A sharded proof-of-stake Layer 1 with a usability focus and an EVM-compatible Aurora sidecar.

The BRICS development bank, sometimes discussed alongside BRICS payment plans.

A non-fungible token. A unique on-chain id used for art, identity, tickets, or game items.

Computer scientist linked to Bit Gold and smart-contract vocabulary that preceded Ethereum.

A computer that speaks a chain's peer protocol, checks rules, and optionally stores the full ledger.

The distinction between growth measured in currency units and growth adjusted for changes in purchasing power, with taxes and fees considered separately where relevant.

A number used once, typically adjusted by miners until a block hash meets the network difficulty target.

Correspondent bank accounts held for cross-border settlement. Crypto ODL tries to reduce pre-funding needs.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the U.S. national-bank regulator, which has issued guidance on crypto custody and stablecoin reserves.

An international framework for collecting and exchanging information about specified crypto-asset transactions for tax transparency.

The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control. It publishes sanctions lists that exchanges and mixers have been charged with violating.

Open, high, low, close prices over a fixed interval, drawn as a candlestick on price charts.

A large global exchange for spot and derivatives, also active in Web3 wallets and on-chain products.

Reading balances, flows, and contract events to understand holders and behavior.

A transfer that stays inside one institution's ledger, settling without an external rail.

A large alleged pyramid scheme marketed as cryptocurrency education and coin, prosecuted across multiple countries.

The number of derivative contracts still outstanding. Rising open interest means new risk is entering.

Client code you can audit. Still verify downloads and reproduce builds when possible.

The largest NFT marketplace by historical volume, a Web2 company on top of on-chain transfers.

Losses from compromised signer devices, fake UI, or social engineering rather than a smart-contract bug. Central to Bybit-era exchange thefts.

An Ethereum scaling ecosystem that develops the OP Stack; OP Mainnet is a particular network built with that stack, and other deployments have their own network configuration.

A rollup that assumes transactions are valid and uses a fraud-proof window so watchers can challenge a lie.

Contracts that give the right, but not the obligation, to buy (call) or sell (put) at a strike price.

A service that brings off-chain data (prices, scores, randomness) onto a chain in a form contracts can read.

A configured update interval that can trigger a price feed report even when the observed price has not crossed its deviation threshold.

A list of resting bids and asks on an exchange. The engine matches incoming orders against that book.

Over-the-counter trading arranged away from a public book, used by large tickets that would move a screen.

The dominant AMM on BNB Chain, with farms, lotteries, and perpetual add-ons.

A crypto-native investment firm known for research and large protocol bets.

A token issued by Paxos representing an interest in allocated physical gold, with each token described by the issuer as backed by one fine troy ounce.

A regulated U.S. trust company that issues PYUSD and has issued other dollar tokens for partners.

The network that moves value: card schemes, RTGS, stablecoins, or Lightning.

A payments company that offers crypto buying and issued PYUSD, a dollar stablecoin with Paxos.

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.

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.