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