Digital asset glossary — 260 terms | Digital Asset Database

All A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Consensus & Security 22 Cryptography 8 Custody & Access 15 Data & Measurement 27 DeFi 17 Foundations 20 Institutional Access 13 Market Structure 28 Regulation & Policy 19 Risk & Failure Modes 23 Scaling & Infrastructure 18 Stablecoins 13 Tokens & Supply 37

Find a term 260 terms shown

Term	Category	In one sentence
13F Filing	Institutional Access	A quarterly United States report in which large institutional managers disclose certain holdings they had on the last day of the quarter.
51 Percent Attack	Consensus & Security	An attack where one party controls enough block production to rewrite recent history and spend the same coins twice.
Account Abstraction	Scaling & Infrastructure	Letting a user's account be a programmable contract, so rules such as spending limits or social recovery replace a single private key.
Account Model	Foundations	An accounting design where the network stores a running balance for each account, like rows in a ledger.
Accounting Treatment of Digital Assets	Regulation & Policy	The rules deciding how a company records the digital assets it holds in its published financial statements.
Accredited Investor	Regulation & Policy	A person or institution meeting income, wealth, or professional criteria that permits them to buy investments not registered for public sale.
Active Address	Data & Measurement	The number of distinct blockchain addresses that sent or received a transaction during a chosen period.
Address	Foundations	A string of characters identifying where digital assets can be sent, usually derived from a public key.
Address Clustering	Data & Measurement	Grouping blockchain addresses that appear to be controlled by the same person or company so activity can be counted per entity.
Address Poisoning	Custody & Access	A scam that plants a look-alike address in your transaction history so you copy it by mistake when you next pay.
Admin Key Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk created when a small group holds keys able to change, pause, or drain a protocol that presents itself as automatic.
Aggregator	DeFi	A service that searches many trading venues or yield sources at once and routes a transaction to the best terms it can find.
Airdrop	Tokens & Supply	A free distribution of tokens to a set of addresses, usually selected by past activity, to spread ownership and reward early users.
Algorithmic Stablecoin	Stablecoins	A stablecoin that attempts to keep its value through supply rules and trading incentives rather than by holding reserves.
Altcoin	Tokens & Supply	Any digital asset other than bitcoin; a loose market label rather than a technical category.
Anti-Money Laundering	Regulation & Policy	The body of law and controls requiring financial firms to detect, prevent, and report attempts to disguise the origin of criminal funds.
Arbitrage	Market Structure	Trading the same asset on two venues at the same time to capture a price difference between them.
Authorized Participant	Institutional Access	A large broker-dealer permitted to create and redeem fund shares directly with the fund, which keeps the share price near the value of the holdings.
Automated Market Maker	DeFi	A smart contract that prices trades from a formula and a pool of assets, so no other trader needs to be on the other side.
Backfill	Data & Measurement	Filling in historical data for a period that was not collected at the time, by reconstructing it after the fact.
Backwardation	Market Structure	A market condition in which futures prices sit below the current spot price, so the curve slopes downward over time.
Bankruptcy Claim	Risk & Failure Modes	A creditor's legal claim in a failed company's court process, which determines who gets paid, how much, and in what order.
Base Fee	Foundations	The minimum fee per unit of gas that every transaction in an Ethereum block must pay, set by the protocol and destroyed.
Basis	Market Structure	The difference between a futures contract's price and the current spot price of the same asset.
Blob	Scaling & Infrastructure	A large chunk of temporary data attached to an Ethereum block, priced separately from gas and deleted after a few weeks.
Block	Foundations	A batch of transactions recorded together, plus a header that links it to the block before it.
Block Builder	Consensus & Security	A specialized party that assembles the contents of a block and sells it to the validator whose turn it is to propose.
Block Height	Foundations	The position of a block in the chain, counted from the first block, which sits at height zero.
Block Time	Foundations	The average time between blocks on a network, which sets how often new transactions get their first confirmation.
Blockchain	Foundations	A shared record of transactions, copied across many computers, where new entries are grouped into blocks and linked in order.
Bridge	Scaling & Infrastructure	A system that moves value between two blockchains, usually by locking an asset on one and issuing a representation on the other.
Bridge Exploit	Risk & Failure Modes	An attack on the software that moves assets between blockchains, usually by faking the proof that a deposit happened on the other chain.
Buyback	Tokens & Supply	A protocol or company using its income to purchase its own token on the market, then either destroying or holding what it buys.
Cascade Liquidation	Market Structure	A chain reaction in which forced closings push the price further, which then triggers more forced closings in the same direction.
Cash Creation	Institutional Access	Creating new fund shares by delivering cash, which the fund or its trading agent then uses to buy the underlying asset.
Censorship Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk that certain transactions are excluded or delayed because the parties who order transactions choose, or are required, to leave them out.
Centralization Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk that a system described as decentralized actually depends on a small number of operators, keys, or service providers.
Centralized Exchange	Market Structure	A company that runs a trading venue where customers deposit funds, and the company holds those funds and matches their orders.
Chain Reorganization	Consensus & Security	When nodes drop recent blocks and adopt a different competing sequence, so the transactions in the discarded blocks are undone.
Circulating Supply	Tokens & Supply	The number of units of an asset currently held by the public and able to move, excluding locked or reserved units.
Client Concentration	Risk & Failure Modes	The share of a network's nodes running the same software implementation, where a single bug could affect all of them together.
Cold Storage	Custody & Access	Keeping the keys to digital assets on a device or medium that is never connected to the internet.
Cold Wallet	Custody & Access	A wallet whose private keys are kept on a device or medium that never connects to the internet.
Collateral Factor	DeFi	The share of a deposited asset's value that a protocol allows a user to borrow against it, set per asset according to its risk.
Collateralized Debt Position	DeFi	A position created by locking collateral in a contract and minting new tokens against it, which are repaid to unlock the collateral.
Commingling of Client Funds	Custody & Access	Mixing customer assets with a firm's own money, or with other customers' assets, so that ownership can no longer be cleanly separated.
Commodity	Regulation & Policy	In United States law, a very broad category of tradable things whose oversight runs mainly through derivatives markets rather than issuer disclosure rules.
Concentrated Liquidity	DeFi	A pool design that lets a depositor commit funds only within a chosen price range, so the same money supports more trading.
Concentration Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk created when a large share of something, such as supply, deposits, or trading activity, sits with a few holders or venues.
Consensus Mechanism	Consensus & Security	The rule set that lets many independent computers agree on one shared history without trusting each other.
Constant Product Formula	DeFi	The rule x times y equals k, which sets a pool's price by keeping the product of its two balances constant through every trade.
Contango	Market Structure	A market condition in which futures prices sit above the current spot price, usually rising with the length of the contract.
Corporate Treasury Policy	Institutional Access	A company's written rules for what it may do with its cash reserves, including whether it may hold digital assets at all.
Counterparty Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk that the other side of an arrangement, such as an exchange, lender, or issuer, fails to deliver what it owes you.
Creation Unit	Institutional Access	The fixed block of fund shares that can be created or redeemed in a single transaction with the fund itself.
Crypto-Collateralized Stablecoin	Stablecoins	A stablecoin created by locking volatile digital assets in a contract at a value greater than the tokens issued against them.
Custody	Custody & Access	The arrangement for safekeeping the private keys that control digital assets, and therefore for deciding who can move them.
Custody Risk	Custody & Access	The risk of losing access to digital assets because of how they are stored, whether by you or by a custodian.
Data Availability	Scaling & Infrastructure	The guarantee that the data behind a block or batch was actually published, so anyone can download it and check the results.
Data Provider	Data & Measurement	A company or project that collects, cleans, and publishes digital-asset data such as prices, supply figures, and network metrics.
Decentralized Exchange	Market Structure	A trading venue built from smart contracts where people trade directly from their own wallets without handing assets to a company.
Delegated Proof of Stake	Consensus & Security	A version of proof of stake where coin holders vote for a small fixed set of block producers instead of validating themselves.
Delegation	Tokens & Supply	Assigning your voting power or your stake to someone who acts on your behalf, while you keep ownership of the tokens.
Depeg	Stablecoins	When a stablecoin trades away from the value it is designed to track, such as below one dollar.
Depeg Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk that a token designed to hold a steady value, usually one dollar, trades away from that value.
Derivatives Market	Market Structure	Markets for contracts whose value comes from another asset's price, such as futures, perpetual futures, and options.
Digital Asset Treasury Company	Institutional Access	A listed company whose primary activity is raising capital in order to hold digital assets on its balance sheet.
Digital Signature	Cryptography	Proof, produced with a private key, that the holder of that key approved one specific message such as a transaction.
Dilution	Tokens & Supply	The fall in each holder's share of total supply that happens when new units are created and given to someone else.
Distributed Ledger	Foundations	A database kept in identical copies by many independent operators and updated by an agreed rule rather than by one owner.
Dominance	Data & Measurement	One asset's market capitalization expressed as a percentage of the combined market capitalization of all assets a provider tracks.
Dusting Attack	Risk & Failure Modes	Sending tiny amounts of an asset to many addresses so the sender can watch how those amounts later move and link addresses to one owner.
EIP-1559	Foundations	The Ethereum change that replaced blind fee auctions with a protocol-set base fee that is destroyed, plus an optional tip.
ERC-20	Tokens & Supply	The most widely used Ethereum standard for interchangeable tokens, defining how balances are read and transfers are authorized.
ERC-721	Tokens & Supply	The Ethereum standard for non-fungible tokens, where every token has a unique identifier and exactly one owner.
EVM	Scaling & Infrastructure	Ethereum's virtual machine, and the de facto standard that many other chains copy so the same contracts can run on them.
Emission Schedule	Tokens & Supply	The published plan for how many new units will be created over time and who receives them.
Exchange Netflow	Data & Measurement	The value of an asset moving into exchange-labeled wallets minus the value moving out, measured over a period.
Exchange-Traded Product	Institutional Access	An umbrella term for investment vehicles whose shares trade on a stock exchange, including registered funds, commodity trusts, and debt notes.
Exit Scam	Risk & Failure Modes	When a business holding customer funds stops honoring withdrawals and its operators disappear with the balance.
Fair-Value Accounting	Regulation & Policy	Recording an asset at what it could be sold for now, with each change in that value flowing through the income statement.
Fee Switch	Tokens & Supply	A setting in a protocol's contracts that, when turned on, redirects part of the fees users already pay toward the protocol or its token holders.
Fiat-Backed Stablecoin	Stablecoins	A stablecoin whose issuer states that it holds cash and short-term government debt at least equal to the tokens in circulation.
Finality	Consensus & Security	The point at which a recorded transaction can no longer be undone by the network reorganizing its recent history.
Flash Loan	DeFi	A loan borrowed and repaid inside a single blockchain transaction, which needs no collateral because the whole transaction reverts if repayment fails.
Fork	Consensus & Security	Any situation where a blockchain has two competing versions, either briefly by accident or lastingly because the rules changed.
Foundation	Tokens & Supply	A legal entity, often a non-profit, created to hold assets and fund work on a blockchain protocol that no single company owns.
Fraud Proof	Scaling & Infrastructure	Evidence submitted on the base chain showing that a layer 2 posted an incorrect result, causing that result to be rejected.
Front-Running	Risk & Failure Modes	Seeing a pending transaction and placing your own ahead of it to profit from the price move it will cause.
Fully Diluted Valuation	Data & Measurement	The current price multiplied by the maximum or total eventual supply, showing what the asset would be worth if every unit already existed.
Funding Rate	Market Structure	A recurring payment between holders of long and short perpetual futures positions that keeps the contract's price near the spot price.
Fungible Token	Tokens & Supply	A token whose units are interchangeable, so any one unit counts exactly the same as any other unit.
Gas	Foundations	The unit that measures how much computing work a transaction uses, and therefore what it costs to run.
Genesis Block	Foundations	The very first block of a blockchain, created when the network starts and written directly into the software.
Governance Attack	Risk & Failure Modes	Acquiring enough voting power in a protocol to pass a proposal that hands its assets or its controls to the attacker.
Governance Token	Tokens & Supply	A token that lets holders vote on changes to a protocol, such as parameters, budgets, and upgrades.
Grantor Trust	Institutional Access	A passive legal trust that holds one asset and issues shares, with tax treated as though holders owned a slice of the asset directly.
Halving	Consensus & Security	A scheduled event in some proof-of-work networks where the new coins paid to miners for each block are cut in half.
Hard Fork	Consensus & Security	A rule change that makes previously invalid blocks valid, so every participant must upgrade or end up on a different chain.
Hash Function	Cryptography	A one-way function that turns any data into a fixed-length fingerprint, where the same input always produces the same result.
Hash Rate	Consensus & Security	How many guesses per second the machines securing a proof-of-work network are making, measured in hashes per second.
Health Factor	DeFi	A single number showing how close a borrowing position is to liquidation, where falling to one means it can be liquidated.
Holder Revenue	Data & Measurement	The portion of a protocol's income that actually reaches token holders, through direct payments, buybacks, or burns.
Hot Wallet	Custody & Access	A wallet whose private keys sit on a device connected to the internet, so transactions can be signed quickly.
Howey Test	Regulation & Policy	A four-part legal test asking whether people put in money, into a common enterprise, expecting profits produced by the efforts of others.
Impermanent Loss	DeFi	The shortfall a pool depositor ends up with compared with keeping the two assets outside the pool, caused by their prices diverging.
In-Kind Creation	Institutional Access	Creating new fund shares by delivering the underlying asset itself to the fund, instead of delivering cash.
Indexer	Data & Measurement	Software that reads a blockchain block by block and reorganizes its contents so applications can query them quickly.
Inflation Rate (Token Supply)	Tokens & Supply	How fast a digital asset's supply is growing, expressed as a yearly percentage of the supply that already exists.
Initial Coin Offering	Tokens & Supply	A sale of a newly created token to the public to raise funds, typically before the product the token is meant for exists.
Insider Allocation	Tokens & Supply	The share of a token's supply reserved at launch for the founding team, employees, advisors, and early investors.
Insolvency	Risk & Failure Modes	When a firm's liabilities exceed its assets, or it can no longer pay what it owes as obligations fall due.
Insurance Fund	Risk & Failure Modes	A pool of assets a trading venue or protocol sets aside to absorb losses when a liquidation fails to cover a debt.
Key Loss	Custody & Access	Permanently losing the secret needed to move your assets, which no company, network, or court can restore.
Know Your Customer	Regulation & Policy	The process a regulated firm uses to verify who its customers are before letting them trade or move money.
Layer 1	Scaling & Infrastructure	A blockchain that runs its own consensus and settles its own transactions, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana.
Layer 2	Scaling & Infrastructure	A separate network that processes transactions off a base chain while relying on that chain for security or dispute resolution.
Lending Protocol	DeFi	A smart contract system where users deposit assets that others can borrow, with interest rates set automatically by supply and demand.
Leverage	Market Structure	Trading with borrowed funds or margin so that a position controls more value than the collateral actually posted.
Licensing Regime	Regulation & Policy	The permission system a jurisdiction uses to decide which firms may hold customer assets or operate a trading or transfer service.
Light Client	Foundations	Software that checks a blockchain using only block headers and small proofs instead of downloading the whole chain.
Liquid Staking	Tokens & Supply	Staking through a service that issues a tradable token representing your staked position, so the position remains usable elsewhere.
Liquidation	Market Structure	The forced closing of a leveraged position by an exchange or protocol when the collateral behind it falls too low.
Liquidation Threshold	DeFi	The collateral-to-debt level at which a protocol allows a borrower's collateral to be sold to repay the loan.
Liquidity	Market Structure	How easily an asset can be traded in size, quickly, without moving its price much.
Liquidity Mining	DeFi	A program in which a protocol pays out its own tokens to people who supply liquidity or use the protocol, in order to attract usage.
Liquidity Pool	DeFi	A shared pot of two or more assets locked in a smart contract that traders trade against and depositors earn fees from.
Liquidity Provider	DeFi	Someone who deposits assets into a pool so that others can trade against them, receiving a share of the trading fees in return.
Liquidity Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk that a position cannot be traded at a reasonable price because there are not enough willing buyers or sellers at that moment.
Look-Ahead Bias	Data & Measurement	Using information in a study of the past that was not actually available at the time, which makes results look better than reality allowed.
MEV	Consensus & Security	The extra value a block producer can capture by choosing which transactions go into a block and in what order.
MPC Wallet	Custody & Access	A wallet in which a private key is split into shares held by different parties and never exists whole in any one place.
Mainnet	Foundations	The live network where transactions carry real value and are permanent, as opposed to a practice network.
Maker and Taker Fees	Market Structure	Exchange fees that charge less to orders which wait in the book and more to orders that trade immediately against them.
Mark Price	Market Structure	The reference price a derivatives venue uses to value open positions and decide liquidations, drawn from several outside spot markets.
Market Capitalization	Data & Measurement	The circulating supply of an asset multiplied by its current price, used as a rough measure of relative size.
Market Depth	Market Structure	A measure of how much can be traded before the price moves by a set amount, usually read from resting orders near the quote.
Market Maker	Market Structure	A firm or program that continuously offers to both purchase and sell an asset, earning the spread for providing that service.
Market Structure Regulation	Regulation & Policy	Rules governing who may operate a trading venue, how orders are matched and reported, and how customer assets and conflicts must be handled.
Maximum Supply	Tokens & Supply	The largest number of units that can ever exist, for assets whose rules impose a hard limit.
Mempool	Consensus & Security	The waiting area of transactions that have been broadcast to the network but not yet included in a block.
Merkle Tree	Cryptography	A structure that hashes items in pairs repeatedly until one hash represents them all, so any single item can be checked cheaply.
Methodology	Data & Measurement	The documented rules a provider uses to define and calculate a metric, including what is counted and what is left out.
MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation)	Regulation & Policy	The European Union's single rulebook for digital assets, covering token issuers, stablecoins, and service providers across all member states.
Mining	Consensus & Security	The process of competing to add the next block in a proof-of-work network, done by machines that guess hashes at high speed.
Mining Difficulty	Consensus & Security	A number the network raises or lowers so blocks keep arriving at the intended average pace, whatever mining power joins or leaves.
Modular Blockchain	Scaling & Infrastructure	A design where separate systems handle execution, settlement, consensus, and data publication instead of one chain doing everything.
Multisignature Wallet	Custody & Access	A wallet that requires several separate keys to approve a transaction, such as two of three or three of five.
Native Asset	Tokens & Supply	The built-in asset of a blockchain itself, used to pay transaction fees and, on proof-of-stake networks, to secure the network.
Net Asset Value	Institutional Access	The per-share value of everything a fund holds, minus what it owes, calculated at one set time each day.
Net Issuance	Tokens & Supply	New units created over a period minus units destroyed, showing whether supply actually grew or shrank.
New Address	Data & Measurement	The count of addresses that appear on a blockchain for the first time during a given period.
Node	Foundations	A computer running blockchain software that stores the chain, checks new blocks against the rules, and relays them to peers.
Node Client Diversity	Consensus & Security	How evenly a network's nodes are spread across independently written software implementations of the same rules.
Non-Fungible Token	Tokens & Supply	A token whose units are individually distinct, so each one has its own identifier and cannot be swapped one-for-one.
Nonce	Cryptography	A number used once; in mining it is the value that is changed while guessing, and in accounts it counts a sender's transactions.
Nothing-at-Stake	Consensus & Security	A theoretical weakness of early proof-of-stake designs in which validators could back every competing chain at no cost.
Off-Chain Data	Data & Measurement	Information about digital assets that does not live on a blockchain, such as exchange trades, company disclosures, and price feeds.
Off-Ramp	Market Structure	A service that converts digital assets back into government-issued money, paid out to a bank account or card.
On-Chain Data	Data & Measurement	Information recorded directly in a blockchain's blocks, readable by anyone who runs or queries a node.
On-Ramp	Market Structure	A service that converts government-issued money into digital assets, usually funded by a bank transfer or a card payment.
Open Interest	Market Structure	The total size of derivative contracts currently open, counting positions that have not yet been closed or settled.
Optimistic Rollup	Scaling & Infrastructure	A rollup that assumes posted results are correct and gives observers a window in which to challenge them with a fraud proof.
Oracle	Scaling & Infrastructure	A service that brings outside information, such as a price or an event outcome, onto a blockchain so contracts can use it.
Oracle Failure	Risk & Failure Modes	When the outside data a blockchain application depends on, usually a price, is wrong, delayed, or manipulated, and the application acts on it anyway.
Order Book	Market Structure	A live list of the prices and quantities people are willing to trade at, sorted from the best bid to the best offer.
Over-Collateralization	DeFi	Requiring a borrower to lock collateral worth more than the amount borrowed, so the loan stays covered if prices move.
Over-the-Counter Trading	Market Structure	Large trades arranged directly between two parties or through a desk, instead of being placed on a public exchange.
Payment Rail	Stablecoins	The underlying network that actually moves value between parties, such as card networks, bank transfer systems, or a blockchain.
Perpetual Future	Market Structure	A derivative contract that tracks an asset's price with no expiry date, kept in line with spot by regular funding payments between traders.
Phishing	Custody & Access	Tricking someone into revealing a secret or approving a transaction by impersonating a trusted person, app, or website.
Premium and Discount to NAV	Institutional Access	The gap between what a listed product's shares trade at and the value of what it holds, expressed as a percentage.
Price Impact	Market Structure	How much a trade moves the market price by itself, simply because of its size relative to the liquidity available.
Prime Broker	Institutional Access	A firm that gives a large trader one account for financing, trading across multiple venues, and settlement.
Priority Fee	Foundations	An optional extra fee per unit of gas paid to the block producer to encourage faster inclusion of a transaction.
Private Key	Cryptography	The secret number that authorizes spending from an address; whoever knows it controls the assets, and it cannot be reset.
Proof of History	Consensus & Security	A timestamping technique used by Solana that creates a verifiable sequence of events before validators vote on them.
Proof of Reserves	Custody & Access	A published check that a custodian holds assets matching what customers are owed, usually combining cryptography with on-chain balances.
Proof of Stake	Consensus & Security	A system where the right to propose and approve blocks goes to participants who lock up the network's own coins as collateral.
Proof of Work	Consensus & Security	A system where computers compete to solve a hard guessing puzzle, and the winner adds the next block.
Prospectus	Regulation & Policy	The formal document an issuer must give investors describing what a security is, how it works, and what can go wrong.
Protocol Emergency Pause	Risk & Failure Modes	A built-in switch letting designated parties freeze some or all of a protocol's functions during an attack or a discovered bug.
Protocol Fees	Data & Measurement	The total amount users pay to use a blockchain or an application, before any of it is divided among the parties who receive it.
Protocol Revenue	Data & Measurement	The part of user fees a protocol keeps for itself, rather than passing on to liquidity providers, validators, or other suppliers.
Public-Key Cryptography	Cryptography	A system of paired keys where one key can be shared openly and the matching secret key is kept private.
Qualified Custodian	Custody & Access	A regulated firm, such as a bank or broker-dealer, that certain professional managers are required to use for holding client assets.
Quorum	Tokens & Supply	The minimum amount of voting power that must take part for a governance vote to count as valid.
Real Yield	Tokens & Supply	A return measured after subtracting the effect of newly created supply, or a return paid out of fees rather than out of newly minted tokens.
Real-World Asset	Stablecoins	An off-chain asset such as a government bill, a loan, or property whose ownership or economic exposure is represented by a token.
Realized Capitalization	Data & Measurement	A network valuation that prices each unit at the value it last moved at, instead of pricing every unit at today's price.
Redemption	Stablecoins	Returning a token to its issuer in exchange for the asset it represents, such as receiving dollars for a stablecoin.
Registration Statement	Regulation & Policy	The filing an issuer submits to a securities regulator before a security may be sold to the public.
Regulatory Perimeter	Regulation & Policy	The boundary that decides which activities require a license and which fall outside a regulator's authority altogether.
Rehypothecation	Custody & Access	When a firm holding your assets as collateral reuses them for its own borrowing or lends them onward to someone else.
Remittance	Stablecoins	A cross-border transfer of money from a person working in one country to a recipient in another, usually family.
Reserve Attestation	Stablecoins	A report by an accounting firm confirming what an issuer's reserves held on a specific date, based largely on information the issuer supplied.
Reserve Audit	Stablecoins	A full external examination of an issuer's financial statements, broader and more demanding than a point-in-time reserve attestation.
Restaking	Tokens & Supply	Reusing already-staked assets to secure additional services, which adds extra rewards and additional ways to lose the same stake.
Revision	Data & Measurement	A change to a previously published data point after new information arrives or a calculation is corrected.
Rollup	Scaling & Infrastructure	A layer 2 that executes transactions in bulk elsewhere and posts the results, plus enough data, back to the base chain.
Rug Pull	Risk & Failure Modes	When the people behind a token remove the money backing it, or sell their own large holding, leaving buyers with something they cannot sell.
Sanctions Screening	Regulation & Policy	Checking customers, counterparties, and blockchain addresses against government lists of parties that firms are forbidden to deal with.
Sandwich Attack	Risk & Failure Modes	Placing one trade immediately before and another immediately after someone else's swap, so their trade moves the price in your favor.
Security (legal sense)	Regulation & Policy	A financial instrument that falls under investor-protection law, which forces whoever sells it to register the offering or qualify for an exemption.
Seed Phrase	Cryptography	A list of ordinary words, usually twelve or twenty-four, that encodes the master secret from which a wallet's keys are generated.
Self-Custody	Custody & Access	Keeping your own private keys, so that no company can move, freeze, or lose your digital assets on your behalf.
Sequencer	Scaling & Infrastructure	The party that receives layer 2 transactions, decides their order, and packages them for posting to the base chain.
Settlement	Market Structure	The moment a trade becomes final and the asset and the payment have actually changed hands.
Sharding	Scaling & Infrastructure	Splitting a network so each node handles only part of the work, instead of every node processing every transaction.
Short Squeeze	Market Structure	A sharp price rise driven by traders with short positions closing them, which requires purchasing the asset back.
Sidechain	Scaling & Infrastructure	An independent blockchain with its own validators that connects to a main chain through a bridge.
Slashing	Consensus & Security	The automatic destruction of part of a validator's staked deposit as a penalty for provably harmful behavior.
Slippage	Market Structure	The difference between the price a trader expected and the price actually received when the trade completes.
Smart Contract	Foundations	A program stored on a blockchain that runs exactly as written whenever someone sends it a transaction.
Smart Contract Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk that the code running a blockchain application behaves differently from what users expect, and money is lost as a result.
Soft Fork	Consensus & Security	A rule change that only tightens the rules, so nodes that have not upgraded still accept the new blocks.
Spot ETF	Institutional Access	An exchange-listed product that holds the asset itself, so its share price tracks the asset's market price rather than futures contracts.
Spot Market	Market Structure	The market where an asset is traded for immediate delivery and payment, rather than as a contract to be settled later.
Spread	Market Structure	The gap between the highest price anyone is currently willing to pay and the lowest price anyone is currently willing to accept.
Stablecoin	Stablecoins	A digital token designed to keep a steady value, usually one unit per dollar, so it can be used for payments and trading.
Stablecoin Legislation	Regulation & Policy	Laws setting who may issue a stablecoin, what assets must back it, and what holders are entitled to redeem.
Staking	Tokens & Supply	Locking up a digital asset to help run and secure a proof-of-stake blockchain, in return for a share of the rewards the network pays.
Staking Ratio	Data & Measurement	The share of an asset's supply that is currently staked, shown as a percentage.
Staking Yield	Tokens & Supply	The rate of rewards a staker earns, usually quoted as a yearly percentage of the amount staked.
State	Foundations	The current record of who owns what and what every contract stores, produced by applying all past transactions in order.
Supply-Side Revenue	Data & Measurement	The share of user fees that goes to the participants providing the service, such as liquidity providers, lenders, validators, or miners.
Survivorship Bias	Data & Measurement	A distortion that appears when failed or delisted assets drop out of a dataset, making the ones that remain look representative when they are not.
Take Rate	Data & Measurement	The share of the fees users pay that the protocol keeps for itself, expressed as a percentage.
Tax Lot	Regulation & Policy	A record of one specific purchase, its quantity, date, and cost, used to calculate gain or loss when that quantity is later disposed of.
Testnet	Foundations	A copy of a network used for testing, where the coins have no market value and mistakes cost nothing.
Token	Tokens & Supply	A unit of value or rights recorded on a blockchain, usually created by a smart contract rather than by the chain itself.
Token Burn	Tokens & Supply	Permanently destroying units of an asset, either by deleting them in the contract or by sending them where nobody can spend them.
Token Issuance	Tokens & Supply	The creation of new units of an asset, either by a blockchain's own rules or by a contract that mints tokens.
Token Standard	Tokens & Supply	A shared set of rules that tokens follow so wallets, exchanges, and other programs can handle them without custom code.
Tokenization	Stablecoins	Recording ownership of, or a claim on, something as transferable entries on a blockchain.
Tokenized Money Market Fund	Stablecoins	Shares in a regulated fund holding short-term government debt, recorded as tokens on a blockchain instead of only in a registrar's ledger.
Total Supply	Tokens & Supply	Every unit of an asset that exists on-chain right now, including locked units, minus any that have been permanently destroyed.
Total Value Locked	Data & Measurement	The market value of the assets sitting in a protocol's smart contracts at a point in time.
Transaction Volume	Data & Measurement	The total value moved over a period, either settled on a blockchain or traded on exchanges, depending on which volume is meant.
Travel Rule	Regulation & Policy	A rule requiring a firm that sends a customer transfer to pass identifying details about sender and recipient to the receiving firm.
Treasury (Protocol)	Tokens & Supply	The pool of assets a protocol or its governing organization controls, used to fund development, grants, and incentive programs.
UTXO	Foundations	An accounting design where a balance is the sum of unspent chunks of coin, each spent whole like a banknote.
Unlock Overhang	Tokens & Supply	The pool of still-locked tokens scheduled for future release, described as supply the market may later have to absorb.
Unlock Schedule	Tokens & Supply	The calendar showing when locked tokens become transferable and enter circulating supply.
Upgradeability Risk	Risk & Failure Modes	The risk that the code holding your funds can be replaced with different code after you have deposited.
Validator	Consensus & Security	A participant in a proof-of-stake network that proposes and approves blocks, backed by a deposit that can be cut for misbehavior.
Validator Concentration	Risk & Failure Modes	How much of a proof-of-stake network's voting power sits with a small number of operators or staking services.
Validity Proof	Scaling & Infrastructure	A cryptographic proof that a batch of transactions was executed correctly, checkable by a contract without redoing the work.
Vault	DeFi	A smart contract that accepts deposits and runs a defined strategy with them automatically, issuing shares that track each depositor's stake.
Vesting	Tokens & Supply	A rule that releases an allocation of tokens gradually over time instead of all at once, usually for founders, staff, and early investors.
Virtual Machine	Scaling & Infrastructure	The standardized computer defined by a blockchain's rules, which every node simulates so contracts behave identically everywhere.
Volume/Market-Cap Turnover	Data & Measurement	Trading volume over a period divided by market capitalization, describing how much of an asset changes hands relative to its size.
Voting Power	Tokens & Supply	How much influence an address has in a governance vote, usually determined by tokens held or tokens delegated to it.
Wallet	Foundations	Software or a device that stores private keys and uses them to sign transactions; it does not hold the assets themselves.
Wash Sale	Regulation & Policy	Selling something at a loss and buying it back almost immediately, which some tax systems treat as a loss you may not claim.
Wash Trading	Data & Measurement	Trading with yourself, or with a partner, to create the appearance of activity without any real change of ownership.
Wrapped Token	Tokens & Supply	A token on one blockchain that represents an asset held somewhere else, so the asset can be used where it does not natively exist.
Yield Farming	DeFi	Moving assets between DeFi protocols to collect the trading fees, interest, and token rewards that each one pays to users.
ZK-Rollup	Scaling & Infrastructure	A rollup that posts a cryptographic proof with each batch showing that the new state was computed correctly.
Zero-Knowledge Proof	Cryptography	A method of proving a statement is true without revealing the information that makes it true.

Glossary

Assets

Fundamentals

Valuation & risk

Institutional

Learn

About

Legal