Crypto & Finance Glossary

How much an asset can be bought or sold without significantly moving the price.

The problem of liquidity being spread across many different chains, DEXs, and pools instead of being concentrated in one place.

Earning tokens by providing liquidity to a protocol.

A pool of tokens locked in a smart contract that enables decentralized trading.

The act of depositing tokens into a liquidity pool to enable trading on a decentralized exchange.

A trade that profits when an asset's price increases.

Tokens that fall outside the top 100-200 by market cap, with lower liquidity and trading volume.

When only a small percentage of a token's total supply is circulating in the market.

A momentum indicator that shows the relationship between two moving averages of a price.

The live, production version of a blockchain where real transactions happen with real value.

The fee charged when your order adds liquidity to the order book, meaning it doesn't fill immediately.

The protocol behind DAI, one of the oldest decentralized stablecoins.

A modular Layer 2 ecosystem focused on zero-knowledge applications.

An Ethereum Layer 2 backed by BitDAO's massive treasury (over $3 billion).

An institutional lending protocol where pool delegates manage lending pools and perform credit assessments on borrowers.

Borrowed money used to increase trading position size.

The leading liquid staking protocol on Solana.

A calculated fair price used by exchanges to prevent unnecessary liquidations from short-term price manipulation.

The total value of all coins or shares in circulation, calculated as price times supply.

A trader or firm that provides liquidity by constantly offering to buy and sell an asset.

An order to buy or sell immediately at the best available price.

The pattern of higher highs and higher lows (bullish) or lower highs and lower lows (bearish) that defines the current trend.

The largest peak-to-trough decline in the value of a portfolio or asset.

The maximum number of tokens that will ever exist.

A cryptocurrency created as a joke or based on internet memes.

The waiting room for unconfirmed transactions before they're included in a block.

A compact proof that a specific piece of data is included in a Merkle tree without revealing all the data.

A data structure used to efficiently verify large datasets.

Virtual worlds where people can interact, work, and play, often with crypto-native economies.

The maximum value that can be extracted from block production beyond standard block rewards and gas fees.

Profit that block producers can extract by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions.

An open-source middleware that lets Ethereum validators outsource block building to specialized builders who compete to create the most profitable blocks.

The European Union's comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto assets that went into effect in 2024.

Using computational power to validate transactions and create new blocks on proof-of-work blockchains.

Creating new tokens or NFTs on a blockchain.

An Ethereum Layer 2 in the Optimism Superchain ecosystem that incentivizes developers and users through its referral and fee-sharing system.

A blockchain design that separates core functions like execution, consensus, settlement, and data availability into specialized layers.

The approach of separating blockchain functions (execution, settlement, consensus, data availability) into specialized layers that can be mixed and matched.

How central banks manage money supply and interest rates to influence the economy.

In DeFi, a protocol where users can lend and borrow assets against collateral.

When a crypto's price increases dramatically.

An Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform built as a parachain on Polkadot.

A lending protocol that sits on top of Aave and Compound to improve rates for both lenders and borrowers.

An indicator that smooths out price data by calculating the average price over a specific period.

Multi-Party Computation wallet.

A wallet that requires multiple private keys to authorize transactions.

An exploit targeting multisig wallets, either through social engineering signers, compromising enough keys to meet the threshold, or exploiting bugs in the multisig contract itself.

A wallet that requires multiple private keys to authorize a transaction, like needing 3 out of 5 keyholders to sign.

The consensus mechanism Satoshi Nakamoto designed for Bitcoin, where the longest chain with the most accumulated proof-of-work is considered the valid chain.

A Layer 1 blockchain that uses a sharding technique called Nightshade for scalability.