U.S. Automated Clearing House batch payments, cheaper and slower than wires.

The risk that the other side only hits your quote when they know more than you.

A signing device that never touches the internet, used with QR or SD transaction flows.

The trading firm affiliated with FTX, at the center of the 2022 collapse.

A pure proof-of-stake chain known for instant finality and institutional tokenization experiments.

Addresses permitted to mint or trade early. Also a phishing lure word in fake mint sites.

Anti-money-laundering controls: monitoring, reporting, and blocking illicit flows.

A federally chartered U.S. crypto bank and custodian.

A venture firm whose crypto funds back many Layer 1s, DeFi protocols, and consumer apps.

A personal code shown in legitimate exchange emails so fakes are easier to spot.

Annual percentage rate. Simple yearly return without compounding.

Annual percentage yield. Yearly return assuming rewards are compounded.

Buying and selling the same risk in two venues to lock a price gap, which helps markets stay aligned.

An Ethereum scaling ecosystem whose Nitro software powers optimistic rollups, including Arbitrum One, with transaction execution off Ethereum and dispute resolution on the parent chain.

Cathie Wood's firm, partner on ARKB, a spot Bitcoin ETF.

Key pairs where the public key verifies what only the private key can sign or decrypt.

Both legs of an exchange succeed or fail together, reducing Herstatt risk.

An Alternative Trading System, a U.S. SEC-registered venue that can match securities without being a full national exchange.

A time-boxed review of contract code. It reduces risk. It does not eliminate it.

A pool formula that prices trades from balances instead of a human order book. Constant-product is the classic form.

A proof-of-stake platform with multiple subnets and an EVM-compatible C-Chain.

Play-to-earn game whose scholarship economy boomed then busted; its Ronin bridge was later hacked.

An Ethereum Layer 2 network with EVM-compatible execution, ETH-denominated gas, and settlement mechanisms that distinguish rapid local confirmations from Ethereum finality and bridge withdrawals.

A rollup whose transaction sequencing is driven by its base layer's block proposers rather than a separate privileged rollup sequencer.

The 2021 Christie's sale of Beeple's Everydays collage that mainstreamed NFT price headlines.

How tightly an asset moves with a benchmark, often Bitcoin, used as a rough risk factor.

The gap between the highest bid and the lowest ask. A wide spread is a hidden trading cost.

The world's largest centralized crypto exchange by volume, with a spot book, derivatives, and a large listing machine.

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 first and largest cryptocurrency. A proof-of-work UTXO chain with a 21 million supply cap, used as digital collateral and a settlement asset.

A proof-of-work cryptocurrency and payment network that split from Bitcoin in August 2017, emphasizing greater transaction capacity on the base chain.

A temporary Bitcoin consensus split caused by differing block-handling behavior between software versions, documented in BIP-50.

An August 2010 Bitcoin validation bug that allowed an invalidly large output total, followed by a software fix and a chain reorganization.

A high-profile lending and trading scam that collapsed in 2018 after promising impossible yields.

A crypto exchange historically tied to Tether's early distribution and to large professional spot flow.

Theft of about 120,000 BTC from Bitfinex. Later U.S. seizures of related coins became a landmark recovery story.

A digital asset infrastructure company offering wallet, custody, and related institutional services through different products and legal entities.

New York's state license for virtual-currency businesses, among the earliest U.S. crypto licensing regimes.

One of the oldest surviving euro-friendly centralized exchanges.

An attacker who exploits for profit or disruption without disclosure.

The world's largest asset manager and issuer of IBIT, a leading spot Bitcoin ETF.