Crypto & Finance Glossary

A valuation metric comparing a company's stock price to its earnings per share.

The largest DEX on BNB Chain, also running on Ethereum and other chains.

Someone who sells at the first sign of price decline.

Practicing trading strategies with fake money to learn without risking real capital.

Processing multiple transactions simultaneously instead of one at a time.

A crypto wallet that uses device biometrics (Face ID, fingerprint) or hardware security keys for authentication instead of seed phrases.

A smart contract in the ERC-4337 account abstraction system that sponsors gas fees on behalf of users.

Proposer-Builder Separation.

Trading or transacting directly with another person without an intermediary.

A fixed exchange rate between two assets.

A DeFi protocol that lets you trade future yield.

A system that anyone can use or participate in without needing approval from a central authority.

A derivative contract similar to futures but with no expiration date.

A social engineering attack where scammers create fake websites, emails, or messages that look legitimate to steal your credentials or trick you into signing malicious transactions.

An early Ethereum scaling solution that creates child chains anchored to the main chain.

A trend where protocols reward users with points instead of tokens, with the implied promise that points will convert to tokens in a future airdrop.

A mechanism where protocols award non-transferable points to users for specific actions like providing liquidity, trading, or bridging.

A multi-chain network that connects different blockchains (called parachains) through a central relay chain.

A decentralized prediction market where you can bet real money on the outcome of real-world events like elections, sports, and crypto prices.

Your collection of investments across different assets.

Determining how much of your portfolio to allocate to a single trade based on your risk tolerance and the trade's risk/reward profile.

Special smart contracts built directly into a blockchain's core code rather than deployed as regular contracts.

A guarantee from a block proposer that a transaction will be included in a future block before it's actually confirmed.

A market where people trade contracts based on the outcome of future events.

How much your trade moves the market price of an asset.

An optional tip paid directly to validators on top of Ethereum's base fee to incentivize faster transaction inclusion.

A cryptocurrency designed to hide transaction details like sender, receiver, and amount.

A secret code that gives you control over your cryptocurrency.

An early funding round where tokens are sold to select investors (usually VCs and angels) at a discount before the public launch.

An ironic phrase used to draw attention to something that's actually very significant.

A cryptographic method for exchanges to prove they hold enough assets to cover all customer deposits.

A consensus mechanism where validators stake tokens as collateral to secure the network.

A consensus mechanism where miners solve computational puzzles to create blocks and earn rewards.

An Ethereum design change that separates the roles of building blocks (choosing which transactions to include) and proposing them to the network.

An Ethereum upgrade (EIP-4844) that introduced blob transactions as a stepping stone toward full danksharding.

A set of rules governing how a network or application operates.

Liquidity that a protocol owns directly instead of renting it through yield farming incentives.

A smart contract pattern that separates the contract's logic from its storage, allowing the logic to be upgraded while keeping the same address and data.

Operating under a persistent fake identity rather than being fully anonymous or using your real name.

A cryptographic key you can share publicly, derived from your private key.

A rapid price increase, often coordinated by groups to artificially inflate value before dumping on latecomers.

Crypto slang describing markets where one trader's gain is another's loss, especially in meme coins and low-cap tokens.