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 & Security 22Cryptography 8Custody & Access 15Data & Measurement 27DeFi 17Foundations 20Institutional Access 13Market Structure 28Regulation & Policy 19Risk & Failure Modes 23Scaling & Infrastructure 18Stablecoins 13Tokens & Supply 37
26 terms shown
| Term | Category | In one sentence |
|---|---|---|
| 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. |