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.

Systems that distribute responsibility for retaining and retrieving data across operators, using protocols, replication and sometimes economic incentives rather than assuming one permanent host.

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.

The problem of getting separate processes to agree on values despite failures, subject to explicit communication and fault assumptions.

A distributed lookup system that assigns responsibility for keys across participating nodes and routes requests to the responsible node.

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.

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.