
Référence
Glossaire
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Consensus & Security22Cryptography8Custody & Access15Data & Measurement27DeFi17Foundations20Institutional Access13Market Structure28Regulation & Policy19Risk & Failure Modes23Scaling & Infrastructure18Stablecoins13Tokens & Supply37
260 termes affichés
| Terme | Catégorie | En une phrase |
|---|---|---|
| 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. |