The twenty words you will meet on every page of this site

Twenty terms account for most of the language used on the asset pages, the screener and the metric catalog. Each is given here with a working definition and, more usefully, with the misunderstanding it most often causes. The glossary holds the full set; this is the subset that appears nearly everywhere.

Words about the chain

These describe the machinery that produces the records everything else is measured from.

• Blockchain — a shared ledger whose history is expensive to rewrite and inexpensive for anyone to verify. It does not imply fast, private, or automatically trustworthy about anything happening away from the ledger.
• Block — a batch of transactions carrying a fingerprint of the previous batch. Production runs to a target rate, so a chain producing blocks on schedule is not evidence of demand.
• Node — software holding the rules and, in the full case, the whole history, checking every block for itself. Node counts are estimates, because nodes are not obliged to be visible to anyone counting.
• Validator — an entity that proposes and attests to blocks under proof of stake, with capital at risk. A validator count is not a count of independent operators, since one operator can run thousands of them.
• Finality — the point at which reversing a transaction becomes prohibitively expensive. Under proof of work it is probabilistic depth rather than a guarantee, which is why services wait for different numbers of confirmations.

Words about what users pay

These turn activity into a number with a currency attached, and they are the terms most often borrowed from company accounts without the accompanying structure.

• Gas — the unit pricing computation and storage. The gas a transaction uses is fixed by what it does; the price per unit fluctuates with demand for the same block.
• Protocol fees — total payments by users, shown as fees over 24 hours and over longer windows. This is a gross figure, not profit, and not a claim belonging to anyone.
• Supply-side revenue — the portion of fees paid to miners, validators or liquidity providers. It is a cost of operating the system, and adding it to holder-facing income double counts the same money.
• Burn — permanent removal of units from supply, often funded by fees. It resembles a share repurchase arithmetically only: no board authorizes it, no obligation sustains it, and no accounting statement records it.
• Total value locked — the market value of assets deposited in a protocol, shown as total value locked. It falls when prices fall even if not one unit is withdrawn, and the same asset can be counted twice when wrapped and redeposited.

Words about supply

These decide what every capitalization figure on the site actually multiplies, which makes them more consequential than their dullness suggests.

• Circulating supply — units judged to be available, reported as circulating supply. The word judged is doing real work, since providers apply different rules to locked and presumed-lost coins.
• Total and maximum supply — everything created and not burned, and the protocol ceiling where one exists. Many assets have no ceiling at all, in which case maximum supply is empty rather than large.
• Market capitalization — price times circulating supply, shown as market cap. It measures scale at the marginal price, not money invested and not realizable value.
• Fully diluted valuation — price times eventual supply, often shortened to FDV. It assumes an unchanged price and applies no discount for units arriving years from now.
• Vesting and unlocks — the timetable on which allocated units become transferable. This is a published schedule, so it is a known fact about future supply rather than speculation about it.

Words about markets and risk

These describe the conditions under which a price forms and a position can be exited.

• Liquidity — how much can trade without moving the price much. It is not the same as volume, which counts what did trade rather than what could.
• Slippage and price impact — the gap between the expected and received price, and the portion of it caused by a trade's own size against available depth. Both grow with size and shrink with liquidity.
• Stablecoin — a token designed to track a currency, usually the dollar. Design determines behavior under stress, and reserve-backed, over-collateralized and algorithmic models fail in entirely different ways, as 2022 demonstrated.
• Staking — locking the native asset to help secure a proof-of-stake chain in exchange for issuance and fees. A nominal yield is partly funded by new units, so real staking yield, net of that issuance, describes a proportional position differently from the headline.
• Custody — who holds the keys. An exchange balance is a claim on the exchange, while keys held directly remove that counterparty and transfer responsibility for recovery to the holder.

Two habits that make the vocabulary work

First, whenever a word is borrowed from equity markets, look for what it drops. Revenue, earnings, buyback, dividend and valuation all arrive without the legal and accounting structure that gives them meaning in a company, and the missing structure is usually the substance of whatever is in dispute. A term that survives the translation intact is rare enough to be worth noting.

Second, read every ratio as a fraction with two contestable inputs. Most published disagreements about digital assets resolve into a disagreement about a denominator: which supply figure, which venues, which definition of transferred value, which window. Each metric page here names both sides for exactly that reason, and comparing two sources without comparing their denominators produces an argument that cannot be settled.

A third habit is worth adding for anyone reading tables quickly. Check whether a column is meaningful for the asset's category before comparing it, since several fields are simply not applicable to some categories and an empty cell is information rather than an omission.

The metric catalog gives the full definition and source layer of every field named above. From here, the screener is a reasonable place to see the terms applied across many assets at once, and research collects the longer studies that use them.