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
19 terms shown
| Term | Category | In one sentence |
|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Know Your Customer | Regulation & Policy | The process a regulated firm uses to verify who its customers are before letting them trade or move money. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Prospectus | Regulation & Policy | The formal document an issuer must give investors describing what a security is, how it works, and what can go wrong. |
| 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. |
| Sanctions Screening | Regulation & Policy | Checking customers, counterparties, and blockchain addresses against government lists of parties that firms are forbidden to deal with. |
| 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. |
| Stablecoin Legislation | Regulation & Policy | Laws setting who may issue a stablecoin, what assets must back it, and what holders are entitled to redeem. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |