Crypto Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the crypto terms you’ll meet across CoinCrafty — from blockchain and stablecoins to gas, staking and DYOR. Honest and jargon-free. New to crypto? Start with Learn Crypto →
51% Attack Advanced
A 51% attack is when one party controls enough of a network's block-production power — mining hash rate under proof of work, or staked coins under proof of stake — to outpace everyone else. That majority lets them reorder or exclude recent transactions and spend the same coins twice. It does not let them take coins out of other people's wallets. Read more →
Airdrop Beginner
An airdrop is a distribution of free tokens to a set of wallet addresses, usually to reward early users, bootstrap a community or promote a new project. Eligibility is often based on past on-chain activity. Airdrops are also one of the most heavily abused themes in crypto, and fake claim pages are a standard way to drain wallets. Read more →
Altcoin Beginner
Altcoin is informal shorthand for any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. The word covers an enormous range: established smart-contract platforms, stablecoins pegged to national currencies, niche experiments and outright junk. It says nothing about quality or purpose, only that the coin is not bitcoin. Some writers also exclude Ether from the label. Read more →
Automated Market Maker (AMM) Intermediate
An automated market maker is the pricing engine behind most decentralised exchanges. Instead of matching buyers with sellers in an order book, it holds assets in a pool and quotes a price from their relative quantities using a fixed formula. Anyone can trade against the pool, and anyone can supply assets to it. Read more →
APR Beginner
APR stands for annual percentage rate: the simple yearly rate a deposit, loan or crypto reward programme quotes before any compounding is counted. It answers one question, which is what percentage you would earn or owe over a full year if the rate held steady and nothing was reinvested. Rates in crypto rarely hold steady. Read more →
APY Beginner
APY, or annual percentage yield, is the return a deposit would earn over a year once compounding is taken into account. It assumes your earnings are repeatedly added back to your balance and then earn in turn. Because of that assumption, APY always looks equal to or larger than the simple rate quoted as APR. Read more →
Arbitrage Intermediate
Arbitrage is buying an asset in one place and selling it in another to capture the price difference. Crypto trades on hundreds of separate venues that do not share a single price, so the same coin can cost slightly more on one exchange than another. Traders and bots close that gap, and the opportunity disappears as they do. Read more →
All-Time High (ATH) Beginner
An all-time high, usually shortened to ATH, is the highest price an asset has ever traded at on the data source you happen to be looking at. It is a record of the past rather than a ceiling or a target. A new high tells you where price has been, and nothing at all about where it goes next. Read more →
All-Time Low (ATL) Beginner
All-time low, usually shortened to ATL, is the lowest price an asset has ever traded at according to whichever data source you are reading. It is a historical record and nothing more. An ATL tells you where a market has been; it makes no claim about where it is going, and it is not by itself a reason to buy anything. Read more →
Bear Market Beginner
A bear market is an extended stretch of falling prices and weak sentiment, the opposite of a rising, optimistic bull market. There is no official start bell, so the label is applied loosely and usually only once the decline is obvious in hindsight. Volumes thin out, attention drains away, and projects without funding tend to fold. Read more →
Bitcoin Beginner
Bitcoin is the first widely used cryptocurrency, launched in 2009 as open-source software. It runs on a decentralised network of computers that agree on a shared ledger of transactions, with no bank or company in charge. Its supply is capped at 21 million coins by the rules of the protocol, and anyone is free to run the software. Read more →
Spot Bitcoin ETF Intermediate
A spot bitcoin ETF is an exchange-traded fund that holds bitcoin itself and issues shares which trade on a conventional stock exchange. Buying a share gives you price exposure through an ordinary brokerage account, while a custodian keeps the underlying coins. What you own is a security backed by bitcoin, not bitcoin you personally control. Read more →
Block Beginner
A block is a bundle of confirmed transactions, packaged together with a timestamp, a summary of its contents and a pointer back to the block before it. Chaining those pointers together is what makes a blockchain a chain. Once a block is accepted by the network, rewriting what is inside it becomes very expensive. Read more →
Block Explorer Beginner
A block explorer is a search engine for a blockchain. Type in a transaction ID, a wallet address or a block number, and it shows you exactly what the network recorded: amounts, fees, timestamps and confirmations. No account is needed and nothing is hidden, because public blockchain data is open to everybody by design. Read more →
Block Reward Intermediate
A block reward is the payment a blockchain hands to whoever produces a valid new block. On Bitcoin it combines newly created coins, called the subsidy, with the transaction fees paid by users in that block. The reward is what makes securing the network worth the cost, and it is written into the protocol's own rules. Read more →
Blockchain Beginner
A blockchain is a shared record of transactions that many independent computers keep at once. New entries are grouped into blocks, and each block is cryptographically linked to the one before it, so the chain builds a tamper-evident history. Because copies live on many machines at the same time, no single operator can quietly rewrite what already happened. Read more →
Cross-Chain Bridge Intermediate
A cross-chain bridge is software that lets value move between two blockchains that cannot talk to each other directly. The coin itself rarely travels. Instead the bridge locks or burns your asset on one chain and issues a matching claim on the other. Bridges are genuinely useful, and they are also among the most heavily exploited pieces of infrastructure in crypto. Read more →
Bull Market Beginner
A bull market is a stretch in which prices trend upward and optimism dominates. The label is descriptive and applied loosely, since no committee declares one, and it is really only confirmed by looking backwards. Its opposite is a bear market, where prices trend down over a sustained period and sentiment turns cautious or fearful. Read more →
Candlestick Intermediate
A candlestick is a chart symbol that summarises price over one time interval using four values: the open, the high, the low and the close. The body spans open to close and is coloured to show which was higher, while the thin wicks reach the extremes. A candle is a compressed record of what already happened. Read more →
CBDC Intermediate
A CBDC, or central bank digital currency, is national money issued in digital form directly by a country's central bank. It is the same unit of account as that country's cash and carries the same institutional backing. Unlike most cryptocurrencies, a CBDC is centrally issued and centrally governed, with its rules set by policy rather than by open code. Read more →
Centralised Exchange (CEX) Beginner
A centralised exchange is a company that runs a crypto marketplace on your behalf. You deposit money or coins, the firm pools them in wallets it controls, and its internal order book matches your buys against other customers' sells. Trading is quick and the interface feels like online banking, but the exchange holds the keys. Read more →
Circulating Supply Beginner
Circulating supply is the number of units of a coin or token that are actually out in public hands and available to trade. It excludes amounts still locked, reserved or not yet issued. It is the figure multiplied by price to get market capitalisation, which makes it one of the most consequential and most inconsistently measured numbers in crypto. Read more →
Cold Storage Intermediate
Cold storage means keeping the keys to your crypto on a device or medium that has never been connected to the internet, so that a compromised computer cannot sign a transaction on your behalf. Hardware wallets are the usual form. The coins stay on the blockchain either way, and what moves offline is the ability to authorise spending. Read more →
Cold Wallet Beginner
A cold wallet keeps the private keys that control your crypto on a device that never touches the internet, usually a small hardware wallet backed up by a written or metal-stamped recovery phrase. Because signing happens offline, malware on your everyday computer cannot quietly drain the funds. You give up a little convenience for a large gain in safety. Read more →
Consensus Mechanism Intermediate
A consensus mechanism is the set of rules a blockchain uses to agree on a single shared history when nobody is in charge. Thousands of independent computers must settle which transactions happened and in what order. The mechanism decides who proposes the next block, how everyone else checks it, and what cheating costs. Read more →
Custodial Beginner
Custodial means somebody else holds the private keys to your crypto. When coins sit on an exchange or in a managed app, your balance is a line in that company's database and a promise to pay you on request. Non-custodial is the opposite arrangement: you hold the keys yourself, and nobody else can move the funds. Read more →
DAO Advanced
A DAO, or decentralised autonomous organisation, is a group that coordinates through on-chain rules rather than a company hierarchy. Members typically hold governance tokens, submit proposals and vote on them, with approved decisions executed by smart contracts. In practice most DAOs are less autonomous than the name suggests, and voting power often sits with a few large holders. Read more →
dApp Beginner
A dApp, short for decentralised application, is software whose core logic runs on a blockchain rather than on a company's servers. The interface usually looks like an ordinary website, but the buttons trigger contract code that anyone can inspect and that no single operator can quietly rewrite or switch off. Read more →
Decentralisation Beginner
Decentralisation describes how widely control over a network is spread. In a decentralised system no single company, server or person can rewrite the rules, censor a transaction or switch the whole thing off, because the work of validating and storing data is shared across many independent participants who must broadly agree. Read more →
Decentralised Exchange (DEX) Intermediate
A decentralised exchange lets people swap tokens directly from their own wallets, with the trade settled by a smart contract instead of a company. There is no account to open and no deposit to make: you connect a wallet, approve a swap, and the contract executes it on-chain. You keep custody throughout, and you keep full responsibility too. Read more →
DeFi Intermediate
DeFi, short for decentralised finance, describes financial services built as public smart-contract code rather than as products of a licensed company. Lending, trading, borrowing and derivatives all have on-chain versions where the rules live in contracts anyone can read. There is no support desk, no reversals and usually no compensation scheme when something breaks. Read more →
Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) Beginner
Dollar-cost averaging means committing a fixed amount of money to an asset on a fixed schedule, whatever the price happens to be that day. Spending the same sum each time buys more units when prices are low and fewer when they are high. The point is to take the timing decision out of your hands, not to remove the risk of the asset itself. Read more →
Bitcoin Dominance Intermediate
Bitcoin dominance is bitcoin's market capitalisation expressed as a share of the whole crypto market's capitalisation. When the figure rises, bitcoin is gaining value faster, or losing it more slowly, than everything else combined. It describes where money sits relative to the rest of the market, not whether the market itself is going up or down. Read more →
DYOR Beginner
DYOR stands for do your own research. It is a reminder that nobody in a chat group, video or thread carries any responsibility for your decisions, and that enthusiasm is not evidence. Used well it means checking primary sources before you act. Used badly it becomes a disclaimer bolted onto promotion so the promoter can dodge accountability. Read more →
ERC-20 Intermediate
ERC-20 is the shared rulebook that fungible tokens on Ethereum follow. It specifies a small set of functions and events — checking a balance, transferring, approving a spender — so any wallet, exchange or app can support a new token without custom code. It describes behaviour only; it says nothing about whether a token has value. Read more →
Ethereum Beginner
Ethereum is a public blockchain built to run programs, not only to move money. Its network executes smart contracts, which are pieces of code that live on the chain and behave the same way for everyone who calls them. Users pay fees in the network's native asset, ether, usually written as ETH. Read more →
Fear & Greed Index Beginner
The Fear & Greed Index is a sentiment gauge that compresses several market indicators into a single score from 0 to 100. Low readings are labelled fear, high readings greed. It is a summary of mood rather than a forecast, describing how the crowd appears to be feeling at a moment in time, not what prices are going to do. Read more →
Fiat Currency Beginner
Fiat currency is money issued by a government and declared legal tender, with no commodity such as gold backing it. Pounds, euros, dollars and yen are all fiat. Its value rests on confidence in the issuing state and on a central bank managing supply. In crypto writing, fiat simply means ordinary national money. Read more →
Fork Intermediate
A fork is a change to a blockchain's rules, or the split that can follow one. Soft forks tighten the rules so software that has not upgraded still accepts new blocks. Hard forks loosen or rewrite them, so everyone must upgrade. When part of the network refuses, the chain splits and both halves continue separately. Read more →
FUD Beginner
FUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt: negative talk about a coin or project meant to frighten people rather than inform them. In crypto the word is also, very often, a label thrown at any criticism at all. Telling the difference between a smear and a fair warning is the skill actually worth having. Read more →
Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) Intermediate
Fully diluted valuation, or FDV, is a token's current price multiplied by its maximum eventual supply rather than the amount circulating today. It is meant to show what a project would be worth if every token that can ever exist already existed at that price, a thought experiment that beginners routinely mistake for a real market value. Read more →
Gas Intermediate
Gas is the unit that measures how much computational work a transaction asks a blockchain to perform. A plain transfer uses little; a complex smart-contract call uses far more. You pay for that work in the network's native coin, at a price set by competition for limited block space, which is why the same action can cost wildly different amounts. Read more →
Genesis Block Intermediate
The genesis block is the very first block of a blockchain, the one every later block ultimately points back to. It is special because it has no predecessor to reference, so it cannot be produced by the ordinary mining process. Instead it is written directly into the network's software, and every node accepts it as the agreed starting point. Read more →
Governance Token Intermediate
A governance token gives its holder a vote on how a protocol is run. Proposals might change a fee, add a supported asset, release money from a treasury or upgrade a contract, and holders vote with their tokens rather than with one vote per person. It is a shareholder-style right over software, without the legal protections shareholders normally get. Read more →
Halving Intermediate
A halving is a scheduled cut to the reward miners receive for producing a block. On Bitcoin it happens every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years, and it halves the rate at which new coins are created. Because the schedule is written into the protocol and known years ahead, it is not a surprise and not a reliable price signal. Read more →
Hardware Wallet Beginner
A hardware wallet is a small dedicated device that keeps your private keys offline. Transactions are prepared on a computer or phone but signed inside the device itself, so the keys never touch an internet-connected machine. You confirm each transaction on the device's own screen, which is the part that protects you from malware quietly swapping the destination address. Read more →
Hash Intermediate
A hash is the fixed-length fingerprint a hashing function produces from any piece of data. Feed in a single word or an entire film and you get the same size of output, always identical for the same input. Change one character and the result looks completely different, which is what makes hashes so useful for detecting tampering. Read more →
Hash Rate Intermediate
Hash rate measures how much guessing work a proof-of-work network is doing: roughly how many hash computations miners collectively attempt every second. It is quoted in enormous units such as terahashes or exahashes per second. A higher hash rate means more hardware and electricity are pointed at the chain, which makes rewriting its history more expensive. Read more →
HODL Beginner
HODL is a deliberate misspelling of hold that became crypto shorthand for keeping an asset through sharp price swings rather than trading in and out. It began as a typo in a forum post and stuck, helped along by the backronym hold on for dear life. It describes an attitude, not a tested strategy or a promise of any outcome. Read more →
Hot Wallet Beginner
A hot wallet is any crypto wallet whose private keys sit on an internet-connected device, such as a phone app, a browser extension or a desktop program. That connection is what makes it quick and convenient, and it is also what exposes it: malware, phishing pages and malicious approvals all reach a hot wallet in ways they cannot reach an offline one. Read more →
Impermanent Loss Advanced
Impermanent loss is the shortfall a liquidity provider ends up with when the prices of the pooled assets move apart. The pool rebalances automatically, leaving you holding more of the weaker asset and less of the stronger one, so your position is worth less than simply keeping the two tokens would have been. Read more →
KYC Beginner
KYC — Know Your Customer — is the identity-verification step most centralised crypto services require before you can trade or withdraw. It typically means submitting your legal name, date of birth, address and a government ID, sometimes with a selfie. It is ordinary practice at regulated financial firms, and it links your activity to your identity. Read more →
Layer 1 Intermediate
Layer 1 is the base blockchain itself: the network that holds the ledger, runs its own consensus rules and settles transactions with finality. Bitcoin and Ethereum are layer 1 networks. Anything built on top of a base chain, borrowing its security rather than providing its own, is described as layer 2. Read more →
Layer 2 Intermediate
A layer 2 is a separate system built on top of a base blockchain that processes transactions off the main chain and then settles the results back to it. The point is speed and lower fees: the base chain keeps its security guarantees while most of the busy work happens elsewhere. Rollups are the best-known example. Read more →
Leverage Advanced
Leverage means holding a position larger than the money you actually put up, with the difference effectively borrowed. It multiplies the result of a price move in both directions. A gain is magnified, and so is a loss, which is why a levered position can be wiped out entirely by a move that an unlevered holder would barely notice. Read more →
Liquidation Advanced
Liquidation is what happens when a leveraged position no longer holds enough margin to stay open, so the platform force-closes it. The trader chooses neither the moment nor the price. The margin committed to that position can be lost in full, and on venues without negative-balance protection the damage can reach further than the margin itself. Read more →
Liquidity Intermediate
Liquidity is how easily an asset can be bought or sold without moving its price. A liquid market has plenty of resting orders on both sides, so an ordinary trade fills close to the quoted level. In a thin market the same order eats through several price levels, and the average price you actually receive is worse than the one you saw. Read more →
Liquidity Pool Intermediate
A liquidity pool is a shared pot of two or more tokens locked in a smart contract so traders can swap against it directly instead of matching with another person. The people who deposit into it are liquidity providers, and they collect a share of the trading fees in exchange for taking on real, non-optional risk. Read more →
Mainnet Beginner
Mainnet is a blockchain's live, public network — the one carrying real transactions and real value. It is the production version of the software, as opposed to a testnet, where developers rehearse with worthless coins. When a project says it has launched on mainnet, it means the system is running for real. Read more →
Market Capitalisation Beginner
Market capitalisation is a coin's current price multiplied by its circulating supply. It is used to compare projects by size and to rank them in league tables. The figure is easy to calculate and easy to misread: it is not money invested, not money that could be withdrawn, and it depends entirely on which supply number the source has used. Read more →
Mempool Intermediate
The mempool is the waiting room for transactions that have been broadcast to a network but not yet included in a block. Each node keeps its own copy, holding valid unconfirmed transactions until a miner or validator picks some of them for the next block. When the mempool is crowded, fees rise and confirmations take longer. Read more →
Metaverse Beginner
Metaverse is a loose umbrella term for persistent, shared virtual spaces — worlds you can enter, move around in and own things inside. In crypto it usually means 3D platforms where land, avatars and items are represented by tokens. The word is used very broadly and heavily marketed, so it is always worth asking what a specific project actually delivers. Read more →
Mining Intermediate
Mining is the process that adds new blocks to a proof-of-work blockchain. Machines compete to find a number that makes the block they are proposing produce a valid hash; the first to succeed publishes it and collects the reward plus the transaction fees inside. The work is deliberately hard, which is what makes rewriting history costly. Read more →
Mining Pool Intermediate
Miners join a mining pool to combine their computing power and share whatever the group earns. Mining alone against a large network is close to a lottery: you might go a very long time without finding a block. A pool finds blocks far more regularly and splits the proceeds according to how much work each member contributed. Read more →
Moving Average Intermediate
A moving average smooths a price series by continuously averaging the last N periods, turning a jagged line into a slower one. It is a descriptive tool: it summarises what price has already done. Because every value is built from data that has already printed, it always lags the market and cannot predict what comes next. Read more →
NFT Beginner
An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a blockchain record that points to one specific item rather than an interchangeable amount. A unit of currency is identical to any other unit; an NFT is deliberately unique, carrying its own identifier and ownership history. People use them for art, collectibles, in-game items, tickets and membership passes. Read more →
Node Intermediate
A node is a computer running a blockchain's software, keeping a copy of the ledger and checking that incoming transactions and blocks obey the rules. Nodes gossip with each other to spread new data across the network. Collectively they are the network: there is no central server behind them, only thousands of independent machines agreeing on the same history. Read more →
On-Chain Beginner
On-chain describes anything recorded directly on a blockchain: a transfer, a smart contract call, a newly minted token. Every participating node keeps a copy, so anyone can verify it independently. Activity that happens inside a company's private database, such as a trade between two users of the same exchange, is off-chain and leaves no public trace. Read more →
Oracle Intermediate
An oracle is the bridge that brings outside information onto a blockchain, such as a price, an interest rate or a sports result, so smart contracts can act on it. Contracts cannot see beyond their own network, so without an oracle a lending market would have no idea what the collateral it holds is currently worth. Read more →
Order Book Beginner
An order book is the live list of buy and sell offers for a trading pair on an exchange. Buyers post the price they are willing to pay, sellers post what they will accept, and the exchange matches them when the two meet. It is the mechanism that produces the price you see quoted on a market page. Read more →
Peg Beginner
A peg is a promise that one asset will track the value of another — most often a token designed to hold a one-to-one value with a national currency. A peg is not a law of nature. It holds only while the mechanism behind it, whether reserves, collateral or an algorithm, keeps working. Read more →
Private Key Intermediate
A private key is the secret number that proves ownership of crypto at a given address and authorises spending from it. Your public address is the part you share so others can pay you. The private key, and the recovery phrase that regenerates it, must never be shared, photographed, typed into a website or stored in a cloud note. Read more →
Proof of Stake Intermediate
Proof of stake is a consensus method where the right to propose and confirm blocks goes to participants who lock up the network's own coin as collateral. Instead of spending electricity to compete, validators put capital at risk: break the rules or go offline and part of that stake can be lost. Honest participation earns rewards. Read more →
Proof of Work Intermediate
Proof of work is the method Bitcoin uses to decide who adds the next block. Computers race to find a number that, when hashed together with the block's contents, produces a result below a target. Finding it takes enormous trial and error; checking it takes an instant. That asymmetry is what makes rewriting history expensive. Read more →
Protocol Beginner
A protocol is the shared rulebook a network runs on: the agreed format of messages, what counts as a valid transaction, how new blocks are added and how new coins are issued. Nobody enforces it from above. It holds because everyone runs software implementing the same rules, and anything breaking them is simply rejected. Read more →
Public Key Intermediate
A public key is the shareable half of a cryptographic key pair. It is calculated from your private key, and your wallet address is in turn derived from it. Sharing it lets others send you funds and check your signatures. The private key and the recovery phrase that generates it are the secret half and must never be shared with anyone. Read more →
Pump and Dump Intermediate
A pump and dump is a coordinated fraud. Organisers quietly accumulate a thinly traded token, manufacture hype to pull buyers in, then sell into that demand and leave the newcomers holding an asset with almost no bids underneath it. The people running it profit precisely because the people who arrive last lose. Read more →
RSI (Relative Strength Index) Advanced
The Relative Strength Index is a momentum indicator that compares the size of recent gains with the size of recent losses and expresses the result on a scale from 0 to 100. It is calculated entirely from past closing prices, so it describes how price has been behaving. It lags by construction and predicts nothing. Read more →
Rug Pull Intermediate
A rug pull is theft. The people behind a token or project take the money put into it and abandon what they built — draining the liquidity, dumping a hidden pile of insider tokens, or simply disappearing with the funds. Holders are left with something they can no longer sell at any meaningful price. Read more →
Satoshi Beginner
A satoshi is the smallest unit of bitcoin the protocol can record: one hundred-millionth of a whole coin. Amounts are actually stored on the network as whole numbers of satoshis, so sats are the base unit and BTC is the convenient label on top. The name honours the pseudonym used by Bitcoin's creator. Read more →
Seed Phrase Beginner
A seed phrase is a list of ordinary words, usually 12 or 24 of them, that a wallet generates when you first set it up. Those words can rebuild every private key in that wallet on any compatible device. That makes the phrase the wallet itself: whoever holds the words controls the funds, permanently and without appeal. Read more →
Sharding Advanced
Sharding splits a blockchain's data and workload into parallel pieces called shards, so no single machine has to process everything. Instead of every node replaying every transaction, each shard is handled by a subset of the network and the results are stitched back together. It is a way to raise throughput without raising the cost of participating. Read more →
Slippage Intermediate
Slippage is the gap between the price you expected when you placed a trade and the price you actually received. It is not a fee; it comes from the market moving or from your order being larger than the depth available at the quoted price. The thinner the market, the wider that gap tends to be. Read more →
Smart Contract Intermediate
A smart contract is a program stored on a blockchain that runs exactly as written whenever someone calls it. It can hold funds and release them when its conditions are met, without a middleman. The name is misleading, because it is neither smart nor a legal contract, and a bug is enforced just as faithfully as the intended behaviour. Read more →
Stablecoin Beginner
A stablecoin is a crypto token designed to track the value of something steadier than crypto, most often a national currency such as the US dollar. The idea is to give you a unit that behaves roughly like cash while still moving on a blockchain. The peg is an engineering goal rather than a law of nature. Read more →
Staking Intermediate
Staking means committing coins to help secure a proof-of-stake network in exchange for a share of the rewards it pays out. Your stake backs a validator that proposes and checks blocks. Rewards are not interest and are not guaranteed: stake can be locked for a period, and misbehaviour or downtime by the validator can destroy part of it. Read more →
Support and Resistance Intermediate
Support and resistance are price areas where a market has previously stalled or turned. Support sits below the current price, where buying has tended to appear; resistance sits above, where selling has. Both are drawn from what has already happened, which makes them a map of past activity rather than a forecast of what a price will do next. Read more →
Testnet Beginner
A testnet is a parallel copy of a blockchain network, run for practice and development. It uses the same software and rules as the live network, but its coins are handed out free by faucets and carry no monetary value. Developers deploy and break things there first, and curious users can rehearse a wallet flow without risking real money. Read more →
Token Beginner
A token is a unit of value created and tracked by a smart contract on an existing blockchain rather than by a blockchain of its own. Ether is the native coin of Ethereum, while the thousands of assets issued on top of Ethereum are tokens. Creating one takes minutes, which is why the label alone says nothing about worth. Read more →
Tokenomics Intermediate
Tokenomics is the design of a token's economy: how many units exist, how new ones are created or destroyed, who received them and on what schedule, and what the token is actually used for. It is the nearest crypto equivalent of reading a company's share structure, and it explains why similar-sounding projects can behave very differently. Read more →
Total Value Locked (TVL) Intermediate
Total value locked, or TVL, is the market value of all the assets deposited in a protocol, or across a whole sector of decentralised finance, at a given moment. It is a headline size metric: how much capital sits inside the smart contracts. It says nothing directly about revenue, safety or whether the protocol is used well. Read more →
UTXO Advanced
A UTXO is an unspent transaction output: a discrete chunk of coin sitting at an address, created by an earlier transaction and not yet spent. Chains built this way have no account balances at all — your wallet's balance is just the sum of the outputs it can unlock. Spending means consuming whole outputs and creating new ones. Read more →
Validator Intermediate
In a proof-of-stake network, a validator is the participant that checks transactions, proposes and attests to blocks, and puts its own coins up as collateral. Behave honestly and it earns rewards; break the rules in a provable way and part of that stake is destroyed. Validators do the job miners do on a proof-of-work chain. Read more →
Volatility Beginner
Volatility describes how sharply and how often a price moves, in either direction. A volatile asset can travel a long way in a short time; a calm one drifts. It measures movement, not quality and not direction, so a high reading tells you a market is unsettled and says nothing about where it is heading. Read more →
Wallet Beginner
A crypto wallet stores keys, not coins. Your balances live on the blockchain; the wallet holds the private key that proves you are allowed to move them and signs transactions on your behalf. Wallets come as phone apps, browser extensions or dedicated devices, and the real difference between them is how well that key is protected. Read more →
Web3 Beginner
Web3 is an umbrella term for an internet built on public blockchains, where you hold assets and identity in your own wallet rather than in a company's account database. It is a loose, contested label rather than a defined technology, and it is used as often for marketing as for engineering, so it pays to ask what someone specifically means. Read more →
Whale Beginner
A whale is a holder whose position is large enough that buying or selling it can visibly move the market. There is no official threshold, because the label is relative to how deep and liquid the asset is. Whales include long-term individual holders, funds and treasuries, and the exchanges and custodians that pool many customers' coins in one wallet. Read more →
Whitepaper Beginner
Projects publish a whitepaper to explain what they are building, how the technology is supposed to work, and how their token fits in. Bitcoin's was a short technical paper; a great many that followed are longer marketing documents with equations attached. Treat a whitepaper as a statement of intent, never as evidence that anything has been built. Read more →
Yield Farming Advanced
Yield farming is the practice of moving crypto between decentralised protocols to collect whatever rewards they are paying, whether trading fees, lending interest or, most often, newly issued tokens handed out to attract deposits. It is best understood not as earning interest but as being paid to carry a stack of risks that other people would rather not hold. Read more →
ZK-Rollup Advanced
A ZK-rollup is a layer-2 network that processes transactions off the main chain, then posts a compressed record together with a cryptographic validity proof. The proof lets the base chain verify that every batched transaction followed the rules without re-executing them, which is what makes rollups far cheaper than transacting on the base layer directly. Read more →