Crypto Glossary

Free distribution of tokens to early users or holders.

Period when altcoins outperform Bitcoin broadly.

Smart contract that prices trades using a math curve instead of an order book.

Yearly return including the effect of compounding.

The highest price an asset has ever reached on a major exchange.

The lowest price an asset has ever traded at since launch.

Sustained downtrend, typically defined as -20% from peak or worse.

Difference between the best buy and best sell price on an order book.

BTC's share of total crypto market cap.

Long-term log-regression bands colored from 'buy' to 'sell'.

Distributed ledger of cryptographically linked blocks of transactions.

Sustained uptrend across the broader crypto market.

Exchange operated by a company that custodies user funds.

Number of coins that are publicly available and tradable.

Initial waiting period before any vested tokens unlock.

Software or hardware that stores private keys and signs transactions.

Strategy of buying a fixed amount on a fixed schedule.

Stablecoin trading meaningfully off its target price.

Exchange that runs entirely on smart contracts, with no custodian.

Router that splits orders across multiple DEXs for the best price.

Percent decline from peak to current price.

Runtime that executes Ethereum smart contracts.

Token price multiplied by max supply, including unreleased tokens.

0–100 sentiment gauge for the crypto market.

Buying late into a rally because everyone else is making money.

Negative narrative spread to drive sentiment down.

Periodic payment between perp longs and shorts.

Fee paid to execute transactions on a blockchain.

Bitcoin event where the block reward is cut in half.

Long-term hold strategy. Originally a typo of 'hold'.

Opportunity cost LPs face when pool token prices diverge.

Identity verification required by regulated exchanges.

Base blockchain — settles its own transactions natively.

Scaling layer that batches transactions and posts them to an L1.

Borrowed capital used to amplify a trading position.

Forced closure of a leveraged position when collateral is insufficient.

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

On-chain reserve of two or more tokens that powers AMM trading.

Bet that price will go up.

Circulating supply multiplied by current price.

The hard cap on how many coins of an asset will ever exist.

Token whose value comes mainly from community attention, not utility.

Queue of pending transactions waiting to be included in a block.

Profit block producers can extract by reordering or inserting transactions.

Ratio of current market cap to the cost basis of all holders.

Unique on-chain token representing ownership of a specific item.

Computer running the blockchain client and storing some or all history.

Studying blockchain data directly to infer market structure.

Total notional value of all unsettled futures contracts.

Live list of all open buy and sell orders for a trading pair.

Derivative contract with no expiry, kept in line with spot via funding.

Tricking users into signing malicious transactions or revealing keys.

Cross of the 111-day SMA above the 350-day SMA × 2.

Secret cryptographic key that controls a wallet's funds.

Consensus where validators lock up tokens to secure the network.

Consensus where miners burn energy to win the right to add blocks.

L2 that bundles transactions into proofs posted on the L1.

Scam where the team drains liquidity and disappears.

Human-readable backup of a wallet's private keys.

Holding crypto in a wallet you personally control.

Bet that price will go down.

Difference between expected and actual execution price on a trade.

Self-executing code deployed on a blockchain.

Third-party code review focused on finding security vulnerabilities.

Token designed to track a fiat currency, usually the US dollar.

Locking tokens in a protocol to earn rewards and secure the network.

Scarcity model that compares existing supply to new annual issuance.

The moment a token is officially created and distributed.

Permanent removal of tokens from circulation.

Scheduled release of previously locked tokens to team, investors or community.

Total USD value of trades over a given period (usually 24h).

Sum of all assets deposited in a DeFi protocol's contracts.

Node that proposes and attests to blocks on a Proof-of-Stake network.

Schedule that gradually releases locked tokens over time.

Address holding enough of an asset to move the market.

Earning rewards by providing liquidity or staking in DeFi protocols.