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
25 terms shown
| Term | Category | In one sentence |
|---|---|---|
| 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. |