学习

01

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.

1. 01 Over-collateralized lending: how a loan is secured and closed 7 min
2. 02 Automated market makers and impermanent loss, with the arithmetic 8 min
3. 03 Where does DeFi yield come from, and who is paying it? 7 min
4. 04 Liquid staking: what the receipt token actually represents 7 min
5. 05 Restaking and the stacked slashing question 7 min
6. 06 On-chain derivatives: perpetual futures, funding and margin 8 min
7. 07 Real-world assets and tokenized treasuries, and what they are not 7 min
8. 08 Oracles: the most common single point of failure in DeFi 8 min
9. 09 Bridges, wrapped tokens and the record of bridge exploits 8 min
10. 10 Composability: why one failure propagates through DeFi 8 min

02

How networks work

Consensus is not agreement about truth or value; it is agreement about the order of transactions and which valid history counts.

1. 01 What is a blockchain network actually agreeing on? 7 min
2. 02 Proof of work: what the electricity actually buys 7 min
3. 03 Proof of stake: the bond a validator posts 8 min
4. 04 Why confirmed means different things on different chains 8 min
5. 05 Forks and reorganizations, and what each one costs 8 min
6. 06 Who miners and validators are, and how they get paid 7 min
7. 07 The security budget and what happens as the subsidy falls 8 min
8. 08 What a node does, and why running one matters 7 min
9. 09 How a network upgrades itself, and who actually decides 8 min
10. 10 What a layer 2 inherits from its layer 1, and what it does not 9 min

03

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.

1. 01 What a spot ETP is, and how it differs from holding the asset 7 min
2. 02 Creation and redemption: how ETP shares are made and unmade 8 min
3. 03 Net asset value, premium and discount, and the Grayscale trust 8 min
4. 04 The fee layer: what a sponsor fee compounds to over time 7 min
5. 05 Qualified custody: what a digital asset custodian actually does 8 min
6. 06 Why a company holding a digital asset is not an endorsement of it 7 min
7. 07 How digital assets are carried on a balance sheet 8 min
8. 08 Digital asset taxation as a set of questions, not answers 8 min
9. 09 The United States regulatory perimeter as a set of open questions 9 min
10. 10 MiCA and the wider global regulatory picture 8 min

04

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.

1. 01 What custody at a centralized exchange really means 7 min
2. 02 Automated market makers versus order books 8 min
3. 03 Liquidity, depth and slippage: what market cap omits 8 min
4. 04 Perpetual futures and the funding rate that anchors them 8 min
5. 05 Leverage and the mechanics of a liquidation cascade 9 min
6. 06 Who market makers are, and when they step away 8 min
7. 07 Wash trading and volume figures that cannot be real 8 min
8. 08 A market that never closes: weekends, gaps and no halts 7 min
9. 09 How price discovery actually happens across venues 9 min
10. 10 Reading a drawdown, a volatility figure and a correlation 8 min

05

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.

1. 01 What a protocol fee is, and who actually pays it 6 min
2. 02 Fees versus revenue, and who keeps the money 7 min
3. 03 Take rate: what a high or a low one implies 6 min
4. 04 Total value locked, and the double-counting problem 7 min
5. 05 DEX volume: the most abused number in the sector 7 min
6. 06 Stablecoin supply on a chain as a demand measure 6 min
7. 07 An address is not a person: reading active addresses 6 min
8. 08 Revenue quality: concentration, incentives, durability 8 min
9. 09 Never add a chain's economics to an application's 7 min
10. 10 Why protocol revenue is not income-statement revenue 8 min

06

Risk

Risk here stacks in separate layers - price, code, keys, counterparties, liquidity and law - and each layer fails in its own way.

1. 01 How to think about risk in digital assets 7 min
2. 02 Smart contract risk: what actually goes wrong in code 8 min
3. 03 Oracle failure: when a protocol reads the wrong price 8 min
4. 04 Bridge compromise: why cross-chain links keep failing 8 min
5. 05 Governance and admin keys: who can change the rules 7 min
6. 06 Custody and self-custody, weighed honestly 7 min
7. 07 Counterparty and exchange risk: the 2022 record 8 min
8. 08 Regulatory risk: the questions that remain unresolved 7 min
9. 09 Market and liquidity risk: price, depth and cascades 8 min
10. 10 Concentration risk in supply, stake and validators 8 min
11. 11 Data-quality risk: what a dashboard number can hide 8 min
12. 12 Personal security: phishing, address poisoning, approvals 7 min

07

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.

1. 01 What is a stablecoin, and what are the three families? 6 min
2. 02 Fiat-backed stablecoins: what is actually in the reserve? 7 min
3. 03 Crypto-collateralized stablecoins and over-collateralization 7 min
4. 04 Algorithmic stablecoins and how UST failed in 2022 8 min
5. 05 Attestations versus audits: what a reserve report proves 7 min
6. 06 Depegs: how they start, how they resolve, and what is normal 7 min
7. 07 Stablecoins as a payment rail, compared honestly 8 min
8. 08 How stablecoin reserves are regulated: the main regimes 8 min

08

Start here

One phrase covers seven very different instruments; telling them apart is the first skill, because each is measured and fails differently.

1. 01 What a digital asset actually is, and how the categories differ 6 min
2. 02 What a blockchain does that an ordinary database cannot 6 min
3. 03 Why anyone pays for block space 7 min
4. 04 What happens between pressing send and a confirmation 6 min
5. 05 What you actually own when you own a token 7 min
6. 06 Keys, wallets and custody, without the jargon 6 min
7. 07 How to read a price, and why two sites disagree 7 min
8. 08 Where the numbers on this site come from 6 min
9. 09 What market capitalization does and does not tell you 7 min
10. 10 The twenty words you will meet on every page of this site 6 min

09

Supply and issuance

Circulating, total, maximum and fully diluted supply answer four different questions, which is why data sources rarely publish the same figure.

1. 01 The four supply numbers, and why they disagree 6 min
2. 02 How new units are created, and who receives them 6 min
3. 03 Token burns: what they do, and what they do not do 6 min
4. 04 Halvings and other supply events fixed years in advance 6 min
5. 05 Vesting, cliffs and unlocks, and why the dates are hard to find 7 min
6. 06 Float and FDV: the arithmetic trap in fully diluted valuation 7 min
7. 07 Staking is a supply question before it is an income one 6 min
8. 08 Inflation versus dilution, and what real staking yield means 7 min
9. 09 Fee switches, buybacks and burns are choices, not entitlements 7 min
10. 10 What sits in a protocol treasury, and who controls it 6 min

10

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.

1. 01 How to read an asset research file, tab by tab 7 min
2. 02 How to read any figure here: value, period, source, time 7 min
3. 03 Using the screener: two worked examples that end in a question 8 min
4. 04 Comparing assets without comparing apples to oranges 8 min
5. 05 Five figures this site deliberately does not publish 8 min
6. 06 Where every number comes from, feed by feed 9 min

11

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.

1. 01 Why valuing a digital asset is harder than valuing a company 7 min
2. 02 Market cap to annualized fees, worked through step by step 8 min
3. 03 Market cap to protocol revenue, and what revenue means here 8 min
4. 04 The fully diluted ratios, and when they are the more honest ones 8 min
5. 05 Market cap to value locked, and what TVL actually counts 7 min
6. 06 Market cap per active address, and why an address is not a person 6 min
7. 07 NVT and settled-value ratios, and how they are known to fail 8 min
8. 08 Fee yield, revenue yield and holder-revenue yield are not income 8 min
9. 09 The limits of every valuation ratio on this site 8 min
10. 10 How to build a comparison set that is not nonsense 8 min
11. 11 What to look at when every valuation ratio is meaningless 7 min
12. 12 A measurement and a judgement are different things 7 min