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UNI$9.59+7.24%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 testCrypto.com DeFi Swap is a fork of Uniswap V2 designed to be the best place to swap and farm DeFi coins.
Shared collateral across positions. One winner can keep another loser alive, and one loser can sink both.
Cross-chain Communication is a market sector used to group crypto assets with similar use or design.
CrossCurve Bridged ETH (Fantom) (XWETH) is a crypto asset primarily associated with fantom.
CrowdSwap (CROWD) is a crypto asset primarily associated with polygon-pos.
Curve's overcollateralized dollar, minted from LLAMMA-style soft-liquidation vaults.
An ATS that lists digital-asset securities. Few exist, and they are not the same as a Binance-style CEX.
How exchanges and lenders reorganize: claims, customer priority fights, and asset recovery timelines.
Crypto Card Issuer is a market sector used to group crypto assets with similar use or design.
When CeFi lenders and funds cannot roll leverage, forced selling hits every correlated asset.
A chartered institution offering qualified custody for funds and ETFs.
When public officials or their affiliates earn from tokens or exchanges while setting policy that affects those markets.
Bundled custody, leverage, and execution for funds, closer to TradFi prime than to retail CEX accounts.
The informal information network where narratives, leaks, and rumors move prices.
A multi-year drawdown after a mania, as in 2018 and 2022.
Crypto-backed Stablecoin is a market sector used to group crypto assets with similar use or design.
Crypto-com is a CEX protocol active on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance. The World Fastest Growing Crypto App.
Crypto.com Exchange is a centralized exchange listed with country Malta.
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 public buy or sell thesis posted on Crypto Twitter, often with a chart screenshot.
When holders try to revive a token after the original team dumps or disappears.
A currency transaction report for large cash moves. Crypto analogs appear as threshold transfer reports.
Curvance (CVE) is a crypto asset.
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.
Similar to Uniswap, Curve Finance is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) based Decentralised Exchange (DEX).
Curve DEX is a Dexs protocol active on Ethereum, Fraxtal, Base. Curve is a decentralized exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum designed for extremely efficient stablecoin trading
Fiat-backed coin redeemable through an issuer that can freeze addresses and must manage banking partners.
Who holds the keys. A custodian can move funds on a client's behalf and takes operational and legal responsibility.
CyberKongz (KONG) is a crypto asset primarily associated with ethereum.
Capitulation and apathy zones where remaining holders are mostly conviction or stuck.
How many times an asset rose from cycle low to high. Useful for humility: past multiples are not promises.
A retrospective label for the manic peak. You only know for sure after the crash.
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 network specialized in data availability, such as Celestia.
An EU directive that extends tax-reporting rules to crypto-asset service providers.
A crypto-collateralized dollar stablecoin originally minted by Maker vaults, now part of the Sky/Maker family.
DANK DOGE (DANKDOGE) is a crypto asset primarily associated with ethereum.
DankDoge AI Agent (DANKDOGEAI) is a crypto asset primarily associated with binance-smart-chain.
Ethereum's roadmap for cheap blob space so rollups can post data without using expensive calldata.
A decentralized autonomous organization. On-chain votes steer a treasury and parameters, with very uneven real-world standing.
LLCs or foundations used to give DAOs a legal home for contracts and taxes.
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.
SKY is a governance token, which is like a digital voting share, for Sky Protocol.
Dash (DASH) is digital cash designed to offer financial freedom to everyone.
The guarantee that transaction data was published so anyone can reconstruct state and challenge fraud.
Data Availability is a market sector used to group crypto assets with similar use or design.
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.
deBridge is a cross-chain interoperability and liquidity transfer protocol that allows the decentralized transfer of arbitrary data and assets between various blockchains
Decentraland (MANA) is a virtual reality platform built on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing users to create, experience, and monetize content and applications in a decentralized virtual environment.
A protocol that lets users trade tokens directly from wallets via smart contracts, typically using liquidity pools.
Decentralized Exchange (DEX) is a market sector used to group crypto assets with similar use or design.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a market sector used to group crypto assets with similar use or design.
Networks that pay independent operators to store files, as Filecoin and Arweave do.
Decred aims to build a community-directed digital currency whose security, adaptability, and sustainability make it a superior long-term store of value.
A crypto media brand covering Web3 culture and markets.
Decrypting (DCRYPT) is a crypto asset primarily associated with base.
Mobile links that open wallet sheets with malicious payloads.
Deepcoin is a centralized exchange listed with country Seychelles.
DeepNode (DN) is a crypto asset primarily associated with ethereum.
Multiple controls: audits, monitoring, limits, timelocks, and circuit breakers together.
Decentralized finance. Lending, trading, and derivatives run by contracts instead of a single broker.
A scoring project for process and documentation quality of protocols.
Defi Saver Asset Management is a CDP Manager protocol active on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism. DeFi Saver is a one-stop management solution for decentralized finance with advanced leverage management tools and unique automated…
The 2020 explosion of yield farming, AMMs, and governance tokens led by Compound, Uniswap, and Yearn.
The 2021 crest of total value locked across DeFi before rates, hacks, and the 2022 bust deflated deposits.
Defi.money (MONEY) is a stablecoin primarily associated with optimistic-ethereum.
The open TVL and DeFi analytics site most practitioners use as a first check.
A trading terminal and analytics product used for on-chain discovery and charts.
A trader who takes outsized risk for outsized upside, often skipping research. Used both as insult and badge.
DEL token is the ecosystem token for Delegate.fun, a platform to automate onchain tasks without coding.
Token holders elect a smaller set of block producers. Faster, more concentrated, easier to cartelise.
Deceiving a user into authorizing account delegation to code that can exercise unintended control over the account.
An institutional crypto research firm covering markets and protocols.
An option's sensitivity to a $1 move in the underlying. Market makers hedge delta by trading spot or futures.
Delta Air Lines rStock (RDAL) is a crypto asset primarily associated with arbitrum-one.
The 2024 Ethereum upgrade that enabled blob data (EIP-4844) and cheapened rollup posting.
When a stablecoin trades away from its target. Recovery depends on reserves, redemptions, and confidence.
Decentralized physical infrastructure networks that reward real-world hardware like wireless or GPUs.
DePIN is a market sector used to group crypto assets with similar use or design.
How much size sits at each price level. Deep books tolerate larger market orders.
Deribit is a CEX protocol active on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. World's biggest Bitcoin and Ethereum Options Exchange and the most advanced crypto derivatives trading platform with up to 50x leverage on…
Deribit Spot is a centralized exchange listed with country Panama.
The BIP-44-style path (m/44'/60'/0'/0/0) that turns a seed into a specific coin address.
Derivatives is a market sector used to group crypto assets with similar use or design.
Derive is a decentralized protocol that creates programmable onchain options, perpetuals, and structured products.
Definitions offer a starting point. Detailed readings include the sources behind the explanation.