The Words of Crypto

Time to understand the language of blockchain, DeFi, NFT and Web3.

2FA

2FA (two-factor authentication) is a security method that requires two separate forms of verification to access an account — typically a password plus a one-time code — adding a second layer of protection beyond a password alone.

51% Attack

A 51% attack happens when one party controls the majority of a blockchain's mining power or stake, letting it reorganize recent blocks and double-spend its own transactions — though it cannot steal other users' funds or rewrite the rules.

Web3

The next evolution of the internet built on blockchain technology, enabling decentralized applications, user-owned data, and peer-to-peer interactions without relying on centralized intermediaries.

Account Abstraction

Account abstraction (notably via ERC-4337) lets crypto wallets behave like programmable smart contracts rather than basic key-based accounts — enabling features like gas paid in any token, social recovery, and batched transactions for a smoother user experience.

Address Poisoning

Address poisoning is a scam where attackers send tiny transactions from an address that looks almost identical to one you use, hoping you'll later copy the fake address from your transaction history and send funds to it.

AI Agent Wallet

An AI agent wallet is a crypto wallet operated by an autonomous AI agent, letting software hold funds and pay for services on its owner's behalf — ideally within strict, programmable limits the owner sets in advance.

Airdrop

A crypto airdrop is the free distribution of tokens to wallet addresses, typically used by projects to bootstrap users, reward early adopters, or decentralize ownership of a protocol.

Altcoin

An altcoin is any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. The term combines "alternative" and "coin" and includes thousands of digital assets like Ethereum, Solana, BNB, and XRP, each designed with different use cases and technologies.

AMM

An AMM (Automated Market Maker) is the algorithm behind decentralized exchanges that prices and settles trades against a liquidity pool using a mathematical formula, instead of matching buyers and sellers through a traditional order book.

Approve

Approving (token approval) is granting a smart contract or dApp permission to spend a specific token from your wallet. It's required to interact with DeFi and DEXs, but over-broad approvals can be a security risk.

Aster DEX

Aster DEX is a multi-chain decentralized perpetual futures exchange supporting up to 200x leverage across BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum, Arbitrum, and other networks, allowing traders to open leveraged positions from their self-custody wallet.

ATH

ATH stands for "all-time high" — the highest price a cryptocurrency has ever reached. It's a key reference point traders use to gauge momentum, sentiment, and how far an asset is from its peak.

Bear Market

bear market is a prolonged period of falling prices and negative sentiment, typically defined as a decline of 20% or more from recent highs, where investors expect prices to keep dropping.

BEP-20

BEP-20 is the token standard for fungible tokens on BNB Smart Chain (BSC), modeled on Ethereum's ERC-20 but with lower fees and faster transactions. It defines how tokens behave across BNB Chain wallets and apps.

Bid-Ask Spread

The bid-ask spread is the gap between the highest price buyers will pay for an asset and the lowest price sellers will accept — a built-in cost of every trade and one of the clearest signals of how liquid a market is.

Binary Option

A binary option is a fixed-payoff financial contract that pays a set amount if an underlying asset's price meets a condition at expiry — structurally similar to a prediction-market share, but tied to asset prices rather than real-world events and traded against a broker rather than other participants.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin (BTC) is the first and most widely recognized cryptocurrency, created in 2009 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto as a decentralized peer-to-peer digital currency that operates without banks or governments.

Blind Signing

Blind signing is approving a crypto transaction you can't fully read or verify — the wallet shows raw data instead of a human-readable action, so you can't be sure what you're authorizing. Clear signing is the safer opposite.

Block

A node is any computer that connects to a blockchain network and helps maintain it by storing, validating, and relaying transactions and blocks.

Blockchain

A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed digital ledger that records transactions across a network of computers, making the data transparent, secure, and nearly impossible to alter.

Bonding Curve

A bonding curve is a smart-contract pricing mechanism that sets a token's price algorithmically from its supply: buying mints tokens and moves the price up the curve, selling returns them and moves it down.

Bridge

A blockchain bridge is a tool that lets you move tokens and data between different blockchains, enabling assets on one network to be used on another that would otherwise be incompatible.

Bull Market

A bull market is a prolonged period of rising prices and optimistic sentiment, typically defined as a gain of 20% or more from recent lows, where investors expect prices to keep climbing.

Chain Abstraction

Chain abstraction is the design goal of letting people use blockchain apps without thinking about which chain they're on — one balance and one interface, with bridging, routing, and gas handled behind the scenes.

Clipboard Hijacking

Clipboard hijacking is malware that watches your device's clipboard for copied crypto addresses and silently swaps them for an attacker's address, so your funds go to a thief when you paste and send.

Cold Wallet

A cold wallet stores your private keys completely offline, making it immune to remote hacks. It is the most secure method for storing large amounts of cryptocurrency long-term.

Collateral

Collateral is an asset pledged to secure a loan or leveraged position — in DeFi, borrowers typically lock crypto worth more than they borrow, and the protocol automatically liquidates it if its value falls too far.

Consensus Mechanism

A consensus mechanism is the set of rules a blockchain uses to let distributed, trustless participants agree on the validity of transactions and the state of the ledger — without any central authority.

Cross Margin

Cross margin is a trading mode in which the entire account balance is used as collateral for all open positions, increasing capital efficiency but putting the full balance at risk of liquidation.

Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security and operates on a decentralized blockchain network, enabling peer-to-peer transactions without intermediaries like banks.

Crypto Drainer

A crypto drainer is malicious code — usually behind a fake website or app — designed to empty a wallet by tricking the owner into signing transactions or approvals that hand over control of their assets.

Cryptography

Cryptography is the mathematics of securing information, and the foundation of crypto: it generates key pairs, signs transactions, and links blocks with hashes so ownership can be proven and history can't be quietly rewritten.

Crypto Wallet

A crypto wallet is an app or device that stores and manages the private keys controlling your cryptocurrency — the coins themselves live on the blockchain, and the wallet is what proves ownership and signs transactions.

Custodial Wallet

A custodial wallet is one where a third party — such as an exchange — holds your private keys and controls your crypto on your behalf, meaning you rely on them to access your funds. It is the opposite of a non-custodial (self-custody) wallet.

DAO

A DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is an internet-native organization governed by its members through rules encoded in smart contracts and on-chain voting, rather than by a central management team.

dApp

A dApp (decentralized application) runs on a blockchain using smart contracts instead of a central server — giving users direct control without a company in the middle

DeFi (Decentralized Finance)

DeFi, short for Decentralized Finance, is a financial ecosystem built on blockchain technology that replaces traditional intermediaries like banks and brokers with smart contracts, enabling open, permissionless lending, borrowing, trading, and earning.

DEX

A DEX (decentralized exchange) lets you trade cryptocurrency directly from your wallet using smart contracts — no company holds your funds or requires an account.

Dust Attack

A dust attack is a privacy attack in which tiny amounts of crypto ("dust") are sent to many wallet addresses, so the attacker can track and analyze transactions to try to deanonymize the owners.

ERC-20

ERC-20 is the technical standard for fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, defining a common set of rules so that tokens work consistently across wallets, exchanges, and apps. It's the most widely used token standard in crypto.

ERC-721

ERC-721 is the Ethereum standard for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — unique, indivisible tokens where each one is distinct from every other, used to represent digital art, collectibles, and ownership of one-of-a-kind items.

Ethereum

Ethereum (ETH) is a decentralized blockchain platform that enables smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps), serving as the foundation for DeFi, NFTs, and much of the Web3 ecosystem.

Event Contract

An event contract is a financial instrument whose payoff depends on whether a specific real-world event occurs by a defined date — the underlying primitive of prediction markets and the regulatory term used by the CFTC for venues like Kalshi.

EVM

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the runtime that executes smart contracts on Ethereum — and because EVM-compatible chains run the same bytecode, apps, tokens, and wallets built for one work across all of them.

Flippening

The flippening is a hypothetical event in which Ethereum's total market value overtakes Bitcoin's — a milestone watched as a barometer of whether the market values programmable smart-contract platforms above digital gold.

Fork

A fork is a change to a blockchain's protocol that causes the chain to diverge a soft fork is backward-compatible, while a hard fork creates a permanent split that can result in a new, separate cryptocurrency.

Funding Rate

The funding rate is a periodic payment exchanged between long and short traders in perpetual futures markets that keeps the perpetual contract price aligned with the underlying asset's spot price.

Gas Fees

Gas fees are payments made to blockchain validators for processing transactions. On Ethereum, fees are paid in ETH and vary based on network demand.

Gasless Transactions

Gasless transactions let users interact with a blockchain without paying the network fee from their own balance — a third party, usually a paymaster contract, sponsors the fee or accepts payment in a different token.

Genesis Block

A genesis block is the first block ever recorded on a blockchain — block zero, hardcoded into the protocol, with no previous block to reference — and every later block traces its history back to it.

Governance Token

A governance token is a cryptocurrency that grants its holders voting rights over a protocol or DAO, letting them propose and decide on changes such as upgrades, fees, and treasury spending.

Halving

A halving is a pre-programmed event in which the reward miners receive for adding a new block is cut in half, reducing the rate at which new coins are created most famously Bitcoin's halving every 210,000 blocks (roughly every four years).

Hardware Wallet

A hardware wallet is a physical device that stores your crypto private keys offline, keeping them isolated from internet-connected devices to protect against hacks, malware, and theft.

Hash

A hash is a fixed-length string of characters produced by running data through a cryptographic hash function; in blockchain, hashes uniquely fingerprint blocks and transactions and secure the chain against tampering.

Hash Rate

Hash rate is the total computing power miners devote to a proof-of-work blockchain, measured in hashes per second — the higher it is, the harder and more expensive the network is to attack.

HIP-4

HIP-4 (Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 4) introduces native prediction-market primitives to the Hyperliquid Layer-1 blockchain, letting event contracts settle alongside Hyperliquid's existing on-chain perpetuals order book in self-custody.

HODL

HODL is a crypto slang term for holding onto your cryptocurrency long-term instead of selling, regardless of price swings — it originated from a misspelling of "hold" and is now often backronymed to "Hold On for Dear Life."

Honeypot

A honeypot is a crypto scam token whose smart contract lets you buy in but secretly prevents you from selling, trapping your funds. The term also describes decoy systems used in cybersecurity to lure attackers.

Hot Wallet

A hot wallet is a crypto wallet that stays connected to the internet. It offers fast access and easy transactions, making it ideal for everyday crypto use.

Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual futures exchange that runs on its own Layer-1 blockchain (HyperEVM), offering high-speed on-chain order-book trading with support for crypto, equity, and commodity perpetuals.

Impermanent Loss

Impermanent loss is the temporary loss a liquidity provider experiences when the prices of the two tokens in a pool diverge, leaving the position worth less than if the tokens had simply been held.

Intents

In crypto, an intent is a signed statement of the outcome you want — trade this for at least that — which specialized actors called solvers compete to execute on your behalf, instead of you crafting the exact transaction yourself.

Interoperability

Interoperability is the ability of different blockchains to exchange assets and data with each other — through bridges, messaging protocols, and shared standards — instead of operating as isolated islands.

Isolated Margin

Isolated margin is a trading mode in which a specific amount of collateral is allocated to a single position, containing liquidation risk to that position and protecting the rest of the trader's account.

KYC

KYC (Know Your Customer) is the identity-verification process that regulated financial services and centralized crypto exchanges use to confirm who their users are — typically requiring ID and personal details before you can trade or withdraw.

Layer 1

A Layer 1 (L1) is a base blockchain network — such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana — that processes and finalizes transactions on its own and provides the foundational security that Layer 2s build on top of.

Layer 2

A Layer 2 (L2) is a secondary network built on top of a base blockchain (Layer 1) that processes transactions off the main chain to make them faster and cheaper, while inheriting the security of the underlying Layer 1.

Leverage (Crypto Trading)

Leverage in crypto trading is the use of borrowed capital to open a position larger than a trader's own funds, multiplying both potential gains and losses by the leverage ratio.

Limit Order

A limit order is an instruction to buy or sell a token only at a specified price or better; instead of executing immediately at the current market rate, it waits until the market reaches your target price.

Liquidation

Liquidation is the automatic closure of a leveraged trading position when losses consume the trader's margin, triggered at a predetermined liquidation price to prevent further loss to the exchange or protocol.

Liquidity

Liquidity is how easily an asset can be bought or sold without moving its price — a liquid market absorbs large trades with little impact, while an illiquid one swings sharply on even small orders.

Liquid Staking

Liquid staking lets you stake crypto to earn rewards while receiving a tradable token that represents your staked position — so your capital stays usable in DeFi instead of being locked up.

Long Position

A long position in crypto trading is a bet that an asset's price will rise — the trader profits when the price goes up and loses when it goes down.

Margin (Trading)

Margin in crypto trading is the collateral a trader posts to open a leveraged position, determining both the size of the position and how much price movement the position can absorb before liquidation.

Market Cap

Market cap (market capitalization) is the total value of a cryptocurrency, calculated by multiplying its current price by its circulating supply — used to gauge a coin's relative size and rank.

Market Order

A market order is an instruction to buy or sell a token immediately at the best price currently available, prioritizing speed of execution over a specific price.

Memecoin

A memecoin is a cryptocurrency whose value comes from community, culture, and speculation rather than underlying utility — its price runs on attention, rallying when the crowd arrives and collapsing when it moves on.

Mempool

The mempool (memory pool) is the waiting area where valid but unconfirmed transactions are held by each node before being selected by miners or validators for inclusion in a block.

MEV

MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) is the extra profit that block producers or sophisticated traders can capture by strategically reordering, including, or excluding transactions within a block — for example through front-running or arbitrage.

Mining

Mining is the process of validating transactions and adding new blocks to a Proof-of-Work blockchain by solving complex mathematical puzzles, in exchange for newly minted coins and transaction fees.

Mint

Minting is the process of creating a new token or NFT and recording it on the blockchain. For NFTs, it's how a digital item is first published on-chain; for tokens, it's how new units are brought into existence.

Mnemonic

A mnemonic (mnemonic phrase) is the human-readable list of words — usually 12 or 24 — that represents a wallet's master key under the BIP-39 standard. It's the technical term for a seed phrase or recovery phrase.

MPC Wallet

An MPC wallet uses multi-party computation to split a private key into shares held on different devices or by different parties, so transactions are signed jointly and the complete key never exists in any single place.

Multisig

Multisig (multi-signature) is a security setup that requires more than one private key to authorize a crypto transaction — for example, 2 of 3 keys — reducing the risk of theft or a single point of failure.

NFT Floor Price

An NFT floor price is the lowest listed price for any item in an NFT collection — a quick gauge of the cheapest way in and the collection's momentum, though it reflects asking prices, not what buyers actually pay.

NFT (Non-Fungible Token)

A unique digital asset stored on a blockchain that cannot be replicated or exchanged on a one-to-one basis. NFTs represent ownership of digital items like art, music, collectibles, and in-game assets.

Node

A node is any computer that connects to a blockchain network and helps maintain it by storing, validating, and relaying transactions and blocks.

Non-Custodial Wallet

A non-custodial wallet gives you full ownership of your private keys. No company can access, freeze, or lose your funds — you are your own bank.

On-Chain Perpetuals

On-chain perpetuals are perpetual futures contracts where order matching, settlement, and collateral custody all happen on a blockchain, allowing traders to open leveraged positions without handing over custody to a centralized exchange.

Onchain Prediction Markets

Onchain prediction markets are crypto-native event-trading platforms where market creation, trading, and resolution all happen via smart contracts, removing the need for a centralized operator and letting users trade from a self-custody wallet.

Open Interest

Open interest is the total number of outstanding derivative contracts — such as perpetual futures — that have not yet been closed or settled, used as a key indicator of market participation and liquidity.

Order Book

An order book is an exchange's live list of buy and sell orders for an asset, organized by price — trades happen when a bid and an ask meet, and the book's depth shows how much buying and selling interest sits at each level.

Outcome Token

n outcome token is a tokenized share representing one possible result of a prediction market — typically a "Yes" or "No" share that pays $1 if its outcome occurs and $0 if it doesn't, with the live price reflecting the market's implied probability.

Paper Wallet

A paper wallet is an offline method of storing crypto by printing or writing your public address and private key (often as QR codes) on paper, keeping the keys completely off any internet-connected device.

Passkey Wallet

A passkey wallet is a crypto wallet secured by a passkey — the device-based biometric credential used for passwordless logins — instead of, or alongside, a written seed phrase, trading transcription risk for platform dependence.

Perpetual Futures (Perps)

Perpetual futures (perps) are leveraged crypto derivatives with no expiry date, letting traders go long or short on an asset's price with leverage while the contract price is kept aligned to the spot market via a periodic funding rate.

Phishing

Phishing is a scam in which attackers impersonate trusted entities — through fake websites, emails, or messages — to trick you into revealing sensitive information like your recovery phrase or private keys, or into signing malicious transactions.

Pig Butchering

Pig butchering is a long-con investment scam where fraudsters build trust over weeks — often through romance or friendly chat — then lure victims into fake crypto trading platforms and disappear with their deposits.

Polymarket

Polymarket is the largest decentralized prediction-market platform, where users trade shares in real-world event outcomes using USDC on Polygon, with markets resolved by the UMA optimistic oracle.

Predict.fun

Predict.fun is an onchain prediction-market platform on BNB Chain that lets users trade event contracts in self-custody while earning yield on idle USDC collateral through Venus integration.

Prediction Market

A prediction market is a marketplace where users buy and sell shares tied to the outcomes of future events, with prices that map directly to the crowd's implied probability of those outcomes occurring.

Private Key

A private key is a secret cryptographic code that gives you full control of your cryptocurrency. Anyone with access to your private key controls your funds.

Proof of Stake

Proof of Stake (PoS) is a consensus mechanism in which validators are chosen to create new blocks based on the amount of cryptocurrency they lock up as collateral (stake), rather than by expending computing power making it far more energy-efficient than Proof of Work.

Proof of Work

Proof of Work (PoW) is the original blockchain consensus mechanism, used by Bitcoin, in which miners compete to solve a computationally intensive puzzle to validate transactions and earn the right to add the next block.

Public Key

A public key is your shareable blockchain identifier derived from your private key. Share it to receive crypto — it cannot be used to access or move your funds.

Pump and Dump

A pump and dump is a scheme where insiders quietly accumulate a token, inflate its price with coordinated hype, then sell their holdings onto latecomers — leaving the buyers who believed the promotion holding a collapsing asset.

Recovery Phrase

A recovery phrase is a list of 12–24 words that backs up your crypto wallet; anyone with it can restore the wallet and access the funds, so it must be kept secret and offline. It is also known as a seed phrase or mnemonic.

Resolution Source

A resolution source is the data feed, oracle, or designated authority that determines the final outcome of a prediction market or event contract — the single most important design choice for any market, since it dictates how disputes are settled and how trustworthy the payoff is.

Restaking

Restaking reuses assets that are already staked to help secure additional protocols and services, earning extra rewards on top of base staking yield — at the cost of extra slashing conditions and smart-contract risk.

Revoke

Revoking is removing a smart contract's previously granted permission to spend tokens from your wallet. It's a key security practice to close off access from dApps you no longer use or no longer trust.

Rollup

A rollup is a Layer 2 scaling solution that bundles ("rolls up") many transactions into a single batch processed off-chain, then posts compressed data back to the Layer 1 — lowering fees while inheriting the base chain's security.

Rug Pull

A rug pull is a crypto scam in which developers attract investment into a project or token, then suddenly abandon it and drain the funds — leaving investors with worthless assets. The name comes from "pulling the rug out."

RWA Perpetuals

RWA perpetuals are perpetual futures contracts based on real-world assets such as US equities, commodities, foreign exchange, and bonds — allowing crypto users to trade leveraged exposure to non-crypto markets directly from a self-custody wallet.

Seed Phrase

A sequence of 12 to 24 randomly generated words that serves as the master key to your crypto wallet. Anyone with your seed phrase can access your funds, so it must be kept offline and private.

Self-Custody Trading

Self-custody trading is the practice of executing trades — including spot and leveraged derivatives — directly from a wallet whose private keys are controlled by the user, eliminating counterparty risk from exchanges or custodians.

Short Position

A short position in crypto trading is a bet that an asset's price will fall — the trader profits when the price goes down and loses when it goes up.

Sidechain

A sidechain is an independent blockchain that runs alongside a main chain and connects to it through a two-way bridge, letting assets move between the two while the sidechain keeps its own rules, consensus, and security.

SIM Swap

A SIM swap is an attack where a criminal takes over your phone number by tricking your mobile carrier, then uses it to intercept SMS codes and reset passwords — often to break into exchange accounts and email.

Slippage

Slippage is the difference between the expected price of a crypto trade and the price at which it actually executes, usually caused by price movement or low liquidity between the time an order is placed and filled.

Smart Account

A smart account is a crypto wallet account controlled by programmable smart-contract code instead of a single private key alone, enabling features like transaction batching, spending limits, sponsored gas, and custom recovery.

Smart Contract

A smart contract is self-executing code stored on a blockchain that automatically enforces agreement terms when predefined conditions are met — no intermediaries needed.

Social Recovery

Social recovery is a wallet-recovery method where trusted parties called guardians can collectively restore your access if you lose your key — no single guardian can move funds, only an approved quorum can rotate the account's key.

Stablecoin

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value by being pegged to a stable asset — usually a fiat currency like the US dollar — combining the stability of traditional money with the speed and flexibility of crypto.

Staking

Staking is the process of locking up cryptocurrency in a blockchain network to help validate transactions and secure the network, earning rewards in return. It is a core feature of Proof of Stake blockchains.

Stop-Loss Order

A stop-loss order is an instruction to automatically sell a token once it falls to a specified price, used to limit losses and protect capital if the market moves against you.

Swap

A swap is the act of exchanging one cryptocurrency directly for another, often within a wallet or decentralized exchange, without needing to convert to fiat or use a traditional order book.

Sybil Attack

A Sybil attack floods a network with many fake identities controlled by one attacker to gain outsized influence — the reason blockchains tie voting power to something costly, like computing work or staked capital, instead of identities.

Take-Profit Order

A take-profit order is an instruction to automatically sell a token once it rises to a target price, locking in gains without having to monitor the market manually.

Token

A token is a digital asset created and managed on an existing blockchain (such as Ethereum), representing anything from currency and governance rights to real-world assets or access to a service unlike a coin, which is native to its own blockchain.

Tokenized Stocks

Tokenized stocks are blockchain tokens designed to track the price of publicly traded shares, giving crypto users stock price exposure on-chain — usually without the legal rights that come with direct share ownership.

TRC-20

TRC-20 is the token standard for fungible tokens on the Tron blockchain, widely used for stablecoins like USDT thanks to its low fees and fast transactions — especially popular in emerging markets for transfers and remittances.

TVL

TVL (Total Value Locked) is a key DeFi metric that measures the total value of crypto assets deposited in a protocol — used to gauge its size, adoption, and overall health.

UMA Protocol

UMA is a decentralized optimistic oracle protocol that delivers off-chain truth to smart contracts — most notably resolving prediction-market outcomes for Polymarket by letting anyone propose an answer that becomes final unless successfully challenged within a dispute window.

Vesting

Vesting is the scheduled release of tokens over time — instead of receiving their full allocation at launch, teams and early investors unlock tokens gradually, aligning their incentives with the project's long-term success.

Volatility

Volatility measures how much and how fast an asset's price moves — crypto markets are known for high volatility, which creates both the outsized gains that attract traders and the sharp drawdowns that punish overexposure.

Wallet Address

A wallet address is a unique string of letters and numbers that identifies a destination on a blockchain — like an account number for crypto — derived from your public key so anyone can send funds to it without seeing your private key.

Whale

A whale is an individual or entity that holds a very large amount of a cryptocurrency — enough that their buying or selling can significantly influence the market price.

World Cup 2026 Prediction Market

A World Cup 2026 prediction market is an on-chain market where participants can explore outcomes of the FIFA World Cup — such as the tournament winner or individual match results through tradable contracts whose prices reflect the crowd's view of each outcome's likelihood.