Crypto & Finance Glossary

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.

When central banks buy assets (usually bonds) to inject money into the economy.

A mechanism in some DAOs that lets dissatisfied members withdraw their proportional share of the treasury and leave.

A sustained increase in prices after a period of decline or consolidation.

A major AMM and DEX on Solana that provides liquidity to the Serum/OpenBook order book.

Physical or traditional financial assets like real estate, government bonds, or commodities that get tokenized and put on a blockchain.

Yield that comes from actual protocol revenue like trading fees, rather than from token emissions that dilute holders.

The actual profit or loss from a trade after you've closed the position.

Adjusting your portfolio back to its target allocation by buying underweight assets and selling overweight ones.

A token that automatically adjusts its supply to maintain a target price or distribute rewards.

An economic downturn typically defined as two consecutive quarters of declining GDP.

A smart contract vulnerability where an attacker calls back into the vulnerable contract before the first function call finishes, draining funds repeatedly.

Using deposited collateral for additional purposes beyond the original loan, essentially using the same asset multiple times.

Crypto slang for 'wrecked,' meaning you lost most or all of your investment.

A service that facilitates transactions between parties without taking custody of funds.

A price level where selling pressure tends to overcome buying pressure, causing price to stall or reverse.

Using already-staked crypto to provide security to additional protocols and earn extra yield.

A token distribution that rewards past users of a protocol who used it before any token or incentive existed.

Total income generated by a company or protocol before expenses.

A DeFi protocol that runs automated options strategies through vaults.

Strategies for limiting potential losses in your investments.

The theoretical return on an investment with zero risk, typically represented by government treasury yields.

The relationship between your potential loss and potential gain on a trade.

A project's planned development milestones and timeline.

A decentralized Ethereum staking protocol that lets anyone run a validator node with just 8 ETH instead of 32.

The percentage gain or loss on an investment relative to its cost.

A Layer 2 scaling solution that bundles many transactions together before posting them to the main chain.

The communication protocol that lets your wallet or dApp talk to a blockchain node.