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