Reference
Glossary
Every term you will meet on this site and most you will meet elsewhere, defined in one sentence a beginner can read and then explained properly. Where a term is routinely misunderstood, the entry says how.
Consensus & Security22Cryptography8Custody & Access15Data & Measurement27DeFi17Foundations20Institutional Access13Market Structure28Regulation & Policy19Risk & Failure Modes23Scaling & Infrastructure18Stablecoins13Tokens & Supply37
27 terms shown
| Term | Category | In one sentence |
|---|---|---|
| Active Address | Data & Measurement | The number of distinct blockchain addresses that sent or received a transaction during a chosen period. |
| 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. |
| Backfill | Data & Measurement | Filling in historical data for a period that was not collected at the time, by reconstructing it after the fact. |
| Data Provider | Data & Measurement | A company or project that collects, cleans, and publishes digital-asset data such as prices, supply figures, and network metrics. |
| Dominance | Data & Measurement | One asset's market capitalization expressed as a percentage of the combined market capitalization of all assets a provider tracks. |
| Exchange Netflow | Data & Measurement | The value of an asset moving into exchange-labeled wallets minus the value moving out, measured over a period. |
| 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. |
| Holder Revenue | Data & Measurement | The portion of a protocol's income that actually reaches token holders, through direct payments, buybacks, or burns. |
| Indexer | Data & Measurement | Software that reads a blockchain block by block and reorganizes its contents so applications can query them quickly. |
| 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. |
| Market Capitalization | Data & Measurement | The circulating supply of an asset multiplied by its current price, used as a rough measure of relative size. |
| Methodology | Data & Measurement | The documented rules a provider uses to define and calculate a metric, including what is counted and what is left out. |
| New Address | Data & Measurement | The count of addresses that appear on a blockchain for the first time during a given period. |
| 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. |
| On-Chain Data | Data & Measurement | Information recorded directly in a blockchain's blocks, readable by anyone who runs or queries a node. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Revision | Data & Measurement | A change to a previously published data point after new information arrives or a calculation is corrected. |
| Staking Ratio | Data & Measurement | The share of an asset's supply that is currently staked, shown as a percentage. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Wash Trading | Data & Measurement | Trading with yourself, or with a partner, to create the appearance of activity without any real change of ownership. |