Education
Learn
From what a digital asset is, to how to read a valuation ratio without mistaking it for an equity multiple. No advice, no price views, no hype.
Lessons
Lessons
108
Tracks
Tracks
11
DeFi
A loan against deposits worth more than the debt, granted by code that never learns the borrower's name, and the parameters that follow from that.
- 01 Over-collateralized lending: how a loan is secured and closed 7 min
- 02 Automated market makers and impermanent loss, with the arithmetic 8 min
- 03 Where does DeFi yield come from, and who is paying it? 7 min
- 04 Liquid staking: what the receipt token actually represents 7 min
- 05 Restaking and the stacked slashing question 7 min
- 06 On-chain derivatives: perpetual futures, funding and margin 8 min
- 07 Real-world assets and tokenized treasuries, and what they are not 7 min
- 08 Oracles: the most common single point of failure in DeFi 8 min
- 09 Bridges, wrapped tokens and the record of bridge exploits 8 min
- 10 Composability: why one failure propagates through DeFi 8 min
How networks work
Consensus is not agreement about truth or value; it is agreement about the order of transactions and which valid history counts.
- 01 What is a blockchain network actually agreeing on? 7 min
- 02 Proof of work: what the electricity actually buys 7 min
- 03 Proof of stake: the bond a validator posts 8 min
- 04 Why confirmed means different things on different chains 8 min
- 05 Forks and reorganizations, and what each one costs 8 min
- 06 Who miners and validators are, and how they get paid 7 min
- 07 The security budget and what happens as the subsidy falls 8 min
- 08 What a node does, and why running one matters 7 min
- 09 How a network upgrades itself, and who actually decides 8 min
- 10 What a layer 2 inherits from its layer 1, and what it does not 9 min
Institutional access and regulation
The listed wrapper, the parts it is made of, and the specific ways a share differs from coins held in a wallet.
- 01 What a spot ETP is, and how it differs from holding the asset 7 min
- 02 Creation and redemption: how ETP shares are made and unmade 8 min
- 03 Net asset value, premium and discount, and the Grayscale trust 8 min
- 04 The fee layer: what a sponsor fee compounds to over time 7 min
- 05 Qualified custody: what a digital asset custodian actually does 8 min
- 06 Why a company holding a digital asset is not an endorsement of it 7 min
- 07 How digital assets are carried on a balance sheet 8 min
- 08 Digital asset taxation as a set of questions, not answers 8 min
- 09 The United States regulatory perimeter as a set of open questions 9 min
- 10 MiCA and the wider global regulatory picture 8 min
Market structure
A balance on an exchange screen is a database entry and a claim on a company, not a coin the account holder controls.
- 01 What custody at a centralized exchange really means 7 min
- 02 Automated market makers versus order books 8 min
- 03 Liquidity, depth and slippage: what market cap omits 8 min
- 04 Perpetual futures and the funding rate that anchors them 8 min
- 05 Leverage and the mechanics of a liquidation cascade 9 min
- 06 Who market makers are, and when they step away 8 min
- 07 Wash trading and volume figures that cannot be real 8 min
- 08 A market that never closes: weekends, gaps and no halts 7 min
- 09 How price discovery actually happens across venues 9 min
- 10 Reading a drawdown, a volatility figure and a correlation 8 min
Protocol economics
A protocol fee is charged by software rather than billed by a company, and the payer, the currency and the recipient are three separate facts.
- 01 What a protocol fee is, and who actually pays it 6 min
- 02 Fees versus revenue, and who keeps the money 7 min
- 03 Take rate: what a high or a low one implies 6 min
- 04 Total value locked, and the double-counting problem 7 min
- 05 DEX volume: the most abused number in the sector 7 min
- 06 Stablecoin supply on a chain as a demand measure 6 min
- 07 An address is not a person: reading active addresses 6 min
- 08 Revenue quality: concentration, incentives, durability 8 min
- 09 Never add a chain's economics to an application's 7 min
- 10 Why protocol revenue is not income-statement revenue 8 min
Risk
Risk here stacks in separate layers - price, code, keys, counterparties, liquidity and law - and each layer fails in its own way.
- 01 How to think about risk in digital assets 7 min
- 02 Smart contract risk: what actually goes wrong in code 8 min
- 03 Oracle failure: when a protocol reads the wrong price 8 min
- 04 Bridge compromise: why cross-chain links keep failing 8 min
- 05 Governance and admin keys: who can change the rules 7 min
- 06 Custody and self-custody, weighed honestly 7 min
- 07 Counterparty and exchange risk: the 2022 record 8 min
- 08 Regulatory risk: the questions that remain unresolved 7 min
- 09 Market and liquidity risk: price, depth and cascades 8 min
- 10 Concentration risk in supply, stake and validators 8 min
- 11 Data-quality risk: what a dashboard number can hide 8 min
- 12 Personal security: phishing, address poisoning, approvals 7 min
Stablecoins and payments
A stablecoin is a token designed to hold a fixed value; the mechanism that holds it there determines how the token behaves under stress.
- 01 What is a stablecoin, and what are the three families? 6 min
- 02 Fiat-backed stablecoins: what is actually in the reserve? 7 min
- 03 Crypto-collateralized stablecoins and over-collateralization 7 min
- 04 Algorithmic stablecoins and how UST failed in 2022 8 min
- 05 Attestations versus audits: what a reserve report proves 7 min
- 06 Depegs: how they start, how they resolve, and what is normal 7 min
- 07 Stablecoins as a payment rail, compared honestly 8 min
- 08 How stablecoin reserves are regulated: the main regimes 8 min
Start here
One phrase covers seven very different instruments; telling them apart is the first skill, because each is measured and fails differently.
- 01 What a digital asset actually is, and how the categories differ 6 min
- 02 What a blockchain does that an ordinary database cannot 6 min
- 03 Why anyone pays for block space 7 min
- 04 What happens between pressing send and a confirmation 6 min
- 05 What you actually own when you own a token 7 min
- 06 Keys, wallets and custody, without the jargon 6 min
- 07 How to read a price, and why two sites disagree 7 min
- 08 Where the numbers on this site come from 6 min
- 09 What market capitalization does and does not tell you 7 min
- 10 The twenty words you will meet on every page of this site 6 min
Supply and issuance
Circulating, total, maximum and fully diluted supply answer four different questions, which is why data sources rarely publish the same figure.
- 01 The four supply numbers, and why they disagree 6 min
- 02 How new units are created, and who receives them 6 min
- 03 Token burns: what they do, and what they do not do 6 min
- 04 Halvings and other supply events fixed years in advance 6 min
- 05 Vesting, cliffs and unlocks, and why the dates are hard to find 7 min
- 06 Float and FDV: the arithmetic trap in fully diluted valuation 7 min
- 07 Staking is a supply question before it is an income one 6 min
- 08 Inflation versus dilution, and what real staking yield means 7 min
- 09 Fee switches, buybacks and burns are choices, not entitlements 7 min
- 10 What sits in a protocol treasury, and who controls it 6 min
Using this site
A guided pass through every tab of an asset page: what each one measures, what it cannot show, and which site-wide section it connects to.
- 01 How to read an asset research file, tab by tab 7 min
- 02 How to read any figure here: value, period, source, time 7 min
- 03 Using the screener: two worked examples that end in a question 8 min
- 04 Comparing assets without comparing apples to oranges 8 min
- 05 Five figures this site deliberately does not publish 8 min
- 06 Where every number comes from, feed by feed 9 min
Valuation
A share is an enforceable claim on audited cash flows; a token usually is not, and that single difference reshapes every ratio built on it.
- 01 Why valuing a digital asset is harder than valuing a company 7 min
- 02 Market cap to annualized fees, worked through step by step 8 min
- 03 Market cap to protocol revenue, and what revenue means here 8 min
- 04 The fully diluted ratios, and when they are the more honest ones 8 min
- 05 Market cap to value locked, and what TVL actually counts 7 min
- 06 Market cap per active address, and why an address is not a person 6 min
- 07 NVT and settled-value ratios, and how they are known to fail 8 min
- 08 Fee yield, revenue yield and holder-revenue yield are not income 8 min
- 09 The limits of every valuation ratio on this site 8 min
- 10 How to build a comparison set that is not nonsense 8 min
- 11 What to look at when every valuation ratio is meaningless 7 min
- 12 A measurement and a judgement are different things 7 min