220 terms
Crypto
- 51% attack
- Controlling most of a chain's mining or staking power, enough to reorder or exclude transactions and reverse recent ones for a double spend.
- Account abstraction
- Protocol support for accounts that are programmable contracts, enabling recovery, batching, session keys and fees paid by someone else.
- Account model
- An accounting design where each address has a running balance and a counter, rather than a set of discrete unspent outputs.
- Active addresses
- The count of distinct addresses sending or receiving on a chain in a period, used as a rough proxy for network usage.
- Address
- The public identifier you send funds to, usually derived from a public key or a contract deployment.
- Address poisoning
- An attack that plants a lookalike address in your transaction history, hoping you copy it from there when sending next time.
- Admin key risk
- The exposure created when a team, multisig or single key can upgrade contracts, change parameters, mint tokens, or move user funds.
- Airdrop
- A free distribution of tokens to qualifying wallets, used to bootstrap users, decentralise supply or reward early activity.
- Airdrop farming
- Deliberately generating on-chain activity across protocols in the hope of qualifying for future token distributions.
- Algorithmic stablecoin
- A token that tries to hold a peg through minting and burning rules or a paired volatile token rather than through held reserves.
- Altcoin
- Any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin; a category ranging from major networks to thousands of tokens with no liquidity.
- Altseason
- A phase where a broad range of alternative coins outperform bitcoin, usually late in a cycle and usually brief.
- Arbitrage bot
- Automated software that buys an asset where it is cheap and sells where it is dear, keeping prices aligned across venues and pools.
- Attestation
- A report from an accounting firm stating what reserves a stablecoin issuer held on a given date. Weaker than a full audit and only a snapshot.
- Audit
- A paid review of contract code by security specialists. Useful evidence of diligence, and never a guarantee that the code is safe.
- Auto-compounding
- Automatically harvesting rewards and reinvesting them, turning a simple rate (APR) into a compounded one (APY).
- Auto-deleveraging
- A venue forcibly closing profitable traders' positions to cover losses it cannot otherwise absorb, used when the insurance fund is exhausted.
- Automated market maker (AMM)
- A smart contract that quotes prices from a formula applied to its own token balances, letting anyone trade against a pool instead of an order book.
- Bad debt
- Debt left in a lending protocol with insufficient collateral behind it, because liquidation failed or arrived too late. A direct loss to depositors.
- Base fee
- The protocol-set portion of a transaction fee that adjusts with congestion and is burned rather than paid to block producers.
- Basis
- The gap between a derivative's price and spot. Positive basis means futures trade above spot, which can be harvested by holding spot and shorting the future.
- Bitcoin dominance
- Bitcoin's market cap as a percentage of total crypto market cap, used to gauge whether money is rotating into or out of altcoins.
- Blacklist function
- Code in a token contract letting the issuer freeze specific addresses so their balances cannot be moved. Standard in major fiat-backed stablecoins.
- Block
- A batch of transactions accepted by a network at one time, linked to the previous batch by a hash.
- Block explorer
- A website that indexes a chain so you can look up any transaction, address, block or contract.
- Block height
- The number of blocks between the chain's first block and the current one; a chain's clock and version number.
- Block reward
- The newly issued coins plus fees paid to whoever produces a block; the main source of a chain's supply inflation.
- Block time
- The average gap between blocks on a chain, which sets how quickly a transaction can first be included.
- Blockchain
- A shared database copied across many computers, where new records are added in batches that each reference the batch before them.
- Blockspace
- The limited room inside blocks that transactions compete for; the real commodity a blockchain sells.
- Borrow APR
- The annualised interest rate on an on-chain loan, floating continuously with utilisation rather than fixed at origination.
- Bridge
- A system that moves value between chains, usually by locking assets on one side and issuing a claim on the other.
- Bridge hack risk
- The concentrated risk that a cross-chain bridge holding pooled assets is exploited, leaving wrapped claims unbacked.
- Bug bounty
- A standing offer to pay researchers for responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities, often scaled to the funds a bug could have taken.
- Burner wallet
- A throwaway wallet funded with a small amount, used to interact with unfamiliar contracts so a bad approval cannot reach your main holdings.
- CEX (centralized exchange)
- A company-run crypto exchange that holds customer funds and matches orders on a traditional order book.
- Chain split
- When one blockchain becomes two permanently separate chains, each with its own coin, history and community.
- Circulating supply
- The number of tokens currently available to trade, excluding locked, vesting, treasury and provably burned coins.
- Coin days destroyed
- A volume measure weighted by how long coins sat still: moving one coin held five years counts far more than moving one held a day.
- Cold storage
- Keeping private keys entirely offline so that remote attackers have no path to them.
- Collateral factor
- The fraction of a collateral asset's value you may borrow against. A factor of 0.75 means $10,000 of collateral supports $7,500 of debt.
- Concentrated liquidity
- Providing pool liquidity only within a chosen price band, earning far more fees per dollar while it trades inside that band and nothing outside it.
- Confirmation
- One block built on top of the block containing your transaction; more confirmations mean history is harder to reverse.
- Consensus mechanism
- The rule set a decentralised network uses to agree on one shared history without a central authority.
- Constant product formula
- The classic AMM rule: the product of the two pool reserves stays constant through a trade, so price rises as you drain one side.
- Cross margin
- Margin mode where your whole account balance backs every position, so profits on one offset losses on another and liquidation is account-wide.
- Crypto-collateralised stablecoin
- A token minted against crypto collateral locked in a smart contract, kept solvent by requiring more collateral value than tokens issued.
- Custodial wallet
- A wallet where a company holds the private keys on your behalf, so your balance is a claim on that company.
- DAO
- A group coordinating through on-chain voting and shared treasury contracts, where token holders approve changes rather than a board or an owner.
- Data availability
- The guarantee that the data behind a batch of off-chain transactions was actually published, so anyone can verify or rebuild state.
- DeFi (decentralized finance)
- Financial services such as lending, borrowing, and trading built as smart contracts on blockchains, without a central intermediary.
- Delisting
- A venue removing a trading pair, forcing holders to withdraw or convert, usually on short notice and into falling liquidity.
- Depeg
- When an asset meant to track a reference price, usually $1, trades meaningfully away from it, signalling doubt about backing, redemption or liquidity.
- DEX (decentralized exchange)
- An exchange that runs as smart contracts on a blockchain, matching trades from liquidity pools rather than an order book, with no custodian.
- DEX aggregator
- A router that splits an order across several pools and venues to find a better overall price than any single pool would give.
- Difficulty
- A protocol setting that makes the proof-of-work puzzle harder or easier so blocks keep arriving at the target interval.
- Dormancy
- Coin days destroyed divided by the volume that destroyed them: the average holding age of coins moved on a given day.
- Double spend
- Spending the same coins twice by getting one transaction confirmed and then replacing it with a conflicting one.
- Dust attack
- Sending tiny amounts of coin to many addresses in order to trace how they are later combined and spent.
- Emissions
- The rate at which a protocol issues new tokens as rewards; a continuous supply stream that yield figures usually ignore.
- Epoch
- A fixed batch of blocks or time slots that a proof-of-stake chain uses to schedule duties, rewards and finality.
- ERC-1155
- A standard that lets one contract hold both fungible and non-fungible token types, with efficient batch transfers.
- ERC-20
- The common interface for interchangeable tokens on Ethereum-style chains, which is why any wallet or DEX can handle almost any token.
- ERC-721
- The standard for non-fungible tokens, where each token ID is unique and individually owned rather than interchangeable.
- Exchange insolvency risk
- The chance that a custodian holding your coins cannot return them, because it lent them out, lost them, or never segregated them in the first place.
- Exchange netflow
- Coins moving onto exchanges minus coins moving off, over a period. Inflows are often read as potential selling, outflows as coins going to custody.
- Exchange reserves
- The total holdings sitting in identified exchange wallets. Falling reserves are usually framed as supply leaving the market.
- Exit liquidity
- The buyers an early holder needs in order to sell. Used as an accusation: the retail flow arriving late exists so that insiders can get out.
- Failed transaction
- A transaction that was included in a block but did not complete; the state change is undone while the gas spent is not refunded.
- Fake volume
- Reported trading activity that does not represent real risk transfer, produced by wash trading, incentive farming, or simple fabrication.
- Fiat-backed stablecoin
- A token that promises redemption for one unit of a currency, backed by cash and short-term securities held by an issuer off-chain.
- Finality
- The point at which a transaction cannot be reversed without breaking the protocol's own rules or destroying staked capital.
- Flash loan
- An uncollateralised loan that must be borrowed and repaid inside a single transaction, made possible because the whole transaction reverts if it is not.
- Flash loan attack
- Using borrowed-and-repaid-in-one-block capital to distort a price, a vote or an accounting formula, then extracting the profit before repaying.
- Floor price
- The lowest asking price in an NFT collection; a headline quote that is easy to manipulate and rarely achievable at size.
- Fully diluted valuation (FDV)
- The market cap a token would have if every token that will ever exist were trading at today's price.
- Funding interval
- How often a perpetual contract settles funding payments, commonly every eight hours, with some venues settling hourly or continuously.
- Funding rate
- A periodic payment between long and short perpetual futures holders that pulls the perp price toward spot; positive means longs pay shorts.
- Gas fee
- The transaction fee paid to a blockchain network to process a transfer or smart-contract interaction.
- Gas limit
- The maximum computation you authorise a transaction to consume; unused gas is refunded, but running out burns the fee and fails.
- Gas war
- A bidding contest for block space when many people want the same scarce thing at once, driving fees to extremes for a short window.
- Gasless transaction
- A transaction whose network fee is paid by a third party or deducted in tokens, so the user needs no native coin to transact.
- Genesis block
- The first block of a chain, hard-coded into the software rather than produced by mining or staking.
- Governance proposal
- A formal on-chain motion to change a protocol's parameters, spend treasury funds, or upgrade its contracts, decided by token-weighted vote.
- Governance token
- A token granting votes over a protocol's parameters, treasury or upgrades, whose economic value depends on what the votes control.
- Halving
- A scheduled event roughly every four years that cuts the reward paid to Bitcoin miners in half, slowing new supply.
- Hard fork
- A protocol change that makes previously invalid blocks valid, so every node must upgrade or be left on a separate chain.
- Hardware wallet
- A dedicated device that stores private keys in a chip and signs transactions internally, so keys never reach your computer.
- Hash
- A one-way fingerprint of data: the same input always gives the same short output, and any change gives a completely different one.
- Hash rate
- The total computing power guessing at a proof-of-work chain's puzzle, usually quoted in hashes per second.
- Hash ribbons
- An indicator comparing a 30-day and 60-day moving average of hash rate, used to flag miner capitulation and its end.
- Health factor
- A single number summarising how close a borrowing position is to liquidation, where 1.0 is the threshold and higher is safer.
- HODL
- Crypto slang for holding through volatility rather than selling, originating from a misspelled forum post in 2013.
- HODL waves
- A chart banding the total supply by how long each coin has been unmoved, showing whether holdings are ageing or turning over.
- Honeypot token
- A token whose contract lets you buy but blocks or taxes selling, so the chart looks healthy while every holder is trapped.
- Hot wallet
- A wallet whose keys sit on an internet-connected device, convenient for daily use and permanently exposed to malware.
- Impermanent loss
- The shortfall a liquidity provider takes versus simply holding the two tokens, caused by the pool selling the winner and buying the loser as prices diverge.
- Index price
- A composite spot price built from several exchanges, used as the anchor for marking derivatives positions and for funding calculations.
- Insurance fund
- A venue's reserve that absorbs losses when a liquidated position is closed worse than its bankruptcy price, protecting winning traders from clawbacks.
- Isolated margin
- Margin mode where each position has its own ring-fenced collateral, so the most you can lose on it is the margin you assigned.
- KYC (Know Your Customer)
- Identity-verification requirements brokers and exchanges must complete before letting you trade, driven by anti-money-laundering law.
- Last traded price
- The price of the most recent trade on a specific venue. What the ticker shows, and not usually what your liquidation is measured against.
- Layer 1
- A base blockchain that settles its own transactions and runs its own consensus, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
- Layer 2
- A network that processes transactions off the base chain but posts data or proofs back to it for security.
- Lending protocol
- A contract where depositors supply assets to earn interest and borrowers take overcollateralised loans, with rates set algorithmically by utilisation.
- Liquid staking
- Staking through a protocol that issues a tradable receipt token, so the staked capital keeps earning while the receipt can be sold or used as collateral.
- Liquidation
- The forced closing of a leveraged position by the exchange when losses consume the posted margin.
- Liquidation bonus
- The discount a liquidator receives on seized collateral, typically 5% to 15%, paid by the borrower as the penalty for letting a position go under.
- Liquidation cascade
- A self-reinforcing chain where forced closings push price further, triggering more forced closings, producing far larger moves than the original news.
- Liquidity lock
- Depositing LP tokens in a contract that prevents withdrawal until a set date, so the pool's founding liquidity cannot simply be removed.
- Liquidity mining
- Paying depositors in a protocol's own token to supply liquidity, buying depth and users with issuance rather than with revenue.
- Liquidity pool
- A smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens that traders swap against, funded by depositors who earn a share of trading fees.
- Listing effect
- The price and liquidity impact of a token being added to a major exchange, often a sharp move on announcement followed by give-back.
- Long/short ratio
- The balance of long versus short positioning on a venue, reported by account count or by position size, used as a crowding gauge.
- Looping
- Depositing collateral, borrowing against it, buying more of the same asset and repeating, to build leverage without a derivatives venue.
- LP token
- A token representing a proportional claim on a liquidity pool, issued when you deposit and burned when you withdraw your share plus accrued fees.
- Maker and taker fees
- The two-tier fee schedule on most venues: posting resting liquidity (maker) costs less than crossing the spread (taker), sometimes even paying a rebate.
- Mark price
- The reference price a venue uses to value open positions and trigger liquidations, smoothed from an external index rather than taken from its own last trade.
- Market depth
- How much can be bought or sold near the current price, usually quoted as the notional resting within 1% or 2% of mid on each side.
- Max supply
- The hard cap on how many tokens can ever exist, where a protocol defines one; many tokens have no cap at all.
- Meme coin
- A token with no cash flow or product whose price is driven entirely by attention, liquidity and reflexive flows.
- Mempool
- The waiting room of broadcast-but-unconfirmed transactions that block producers pick from, usually highest fee first.
- Merkle tree
- A hash structure that lets you prove one transaction was included in a block without downloading the whole block.
- MEV
- Value a block producer or searcher can capture by choosing which transactions go in a block and in what order, beyond the fees those transactions pay.
- Miner capitulation
- A phase where mining revenue falls below running costs, forcing weaker operators to sell reserves and switch off machines until difficulty adjusts.
- Mint (NFT)
- Buying newly created NFTs directly from the project's contract, usually in a competitive window with gas costs to match.
- Minting
- Creating new tokens, either by protocol rule such as block rewards, or by a contract function someone controls.
- Modular blockchain
- A design that splits execution, settlement, consensus and data availability across separate specialised layers instead of one chain doing all four.
- Multisig wallet
- A wallet requiring several keys to approve a transaction, removing any single point of failure or single person's mistake.
- MVRV ratio
- Market cap divided by realised cap. Above 1 the average coin is held in profit; extreme readings have historically marked cycle tops and bottoms.
- Name service (ENS-style)
- A human-readable name that resolves to a crypto address, replacing a long hex string with something you can read and remember.
- NFT
- A token representing a unique item rather than an interchangeable unit, traded individually and priced by collection floor plus traits.
- NFT royalties
- A percentage of each secondary sale directed to the original creator, enforced by marketplace policy rather than by the chain itself.
- Node
- A computer that keeps a full copy of a chain and independently checks every block against the rules.
- Non-custodial wallet
- A wallet where you alone hold the private keys, so no company can freeze, lend or lose your funds, and none can recover them either.
- Nonce
- A counter attached to transactions from an address that fixes their order, or in mining, the number varied to search for a valid hash.
- NUPL
- The share of total market value that is unrealised profit, used to describe how much paper gain the market is sitting on.
- On-chain
- Activity recorded directly on a blockchain, such as transfers and wallet balances, which anyone can inspect.
- On-chain front-running
- Submitting a transaction designed to execute before a pending one you can see, exploiting the fact that the mempool is public before settlement.
- On-chain liquidation
- The permissionless closing of an undercollateralised loan, where anyone may repay part of the debt and claim collateral at a discount.
- On-chain volume
- The total value moved on a chain in a period, distinct from exchange trading volume, which mostly happens in databases rather than on the chain.
- Optimistic rollup
- A rollup that assumes posted batches are valid and relies on a challenge window in which anyone can prove fraud.
- Oracle
- A service that reports off-chain information, usually prices, onto a blockchain so smart contracts can use it. The point where DeFi touches the outside world.
- Oracle manipulation
- Attacking a protocol by distorting the price it reads, usually by trading a thin market the oracle depends on, then exploiting the false valuation.
- Perpetual futures (perps)
- Crypto derivative contracts with no expiry date that track the spot price through a periodic funding payment between longs and shorts.
- Presale
- Selling tokens before public trading begins, usually at a discount to insiders and early backers, with lock-ups that vary widely.
- Price feed aggregation
- Combining quotes from many venues, often by median, so no single exchange outage, wick or manipulated market sets the on-chain price.
- Price impact
- How far your own order moves the price, measured against the price before you traded. On an AMM it is a function of trade size relative to pool depth.
- Priority fee
- The extra amount per unit of gas paid directly to the block producer to get your transaction included sooner.
- Private key
- The secret number that authorises spending from an address; whoever holds it controls the funds, permanently and without appeal.
- Private mempool
- Sending a transaction directly to block builders instead of the public queue, so bots cannot see it in advance and trade against it.
- Proof of reserves
- A published cryptographic demonstration that a custodian holds assets matching customer balances, usually a Merkle tree of accounts plus signed wallet addresses.
- Proof of stake
- A consensus system where block producers are chosen in proportion to coins they lock up, and lose those coins for cheating.
- Proof of work
- A consensus system where block producers spend electricity searching for a valid hash, making history expensive to rewrite.
- Protocol treasury
- The pool of assets a protocol controls, usually governance tokens plus accumulated fees, spent on development, incentives and liquidity.
- Public key
- The shareable half of a key pair, derived from the private key, used to verify signatures and generate an address.
- Puell multiple
- Daily miner revenue in dollars divided by its own 365-day average, used to judge whether issuance-driven sell pressure is unusually high or low.
- Pump group
- An organised group that coordinates buying an illiquid asset to spike the price, then sells into the demand the spike attracts.
- Quorum
- The minimum participation a governance vote needs to count. Set too high and nothing passes; too low and a small group can decide everything.
- Real yield
- Return paid out of a protocol's actual revenue, such as trading fees or interest, rather than out of newly issued tokens.
- Realised cap
- The sum of every coin valued at the price when it last moved, rather than at today's price. An estimate of the capital actually invested in a network.
- Rebase token
- A token whose supply automatically expands or contracts across all wallets, so your balance changes while your ownership share does not.
- Redemption
- Exchanging a stablecoin with its issuer for the underlying currency at par. The mechanism that anchors a peg, and often unavailable to small holders.
- Reorg (chain reorganisation)
- When a network discards recently accepted blocks in favour of a competing branch, un-confirming the transactions inside them.
- Replace-by-fee (RBF)
- Resubmitting a pending transaction with the same nonce or inputs and a higher fee, so producers pick the new version instead.
- Replay attack
- Broadcasting a transaction valid on one chain onto another chain where it is also valid, usually after a fork produces two histories sharing the same balances.
- Restaking
- Reusing already-staked capital to also secure additional services, earning extra rewards while accepting additional slashing conditions.
- Rollup
- A layer 2 that executes transactions off-chain and publishes compressed data back to the base chain so anyone can verify or reconstruct state.
- Rug pull
- A scam where a token's creators drain the liquidity or dump their holdings after attracting buyers, leaving the token worthless.
- Sandwich attack
- A bot buying just before your swap and selling just after it, pushing your fill to the worst price your slippage setting allows and pocketing the difference.
- Seed phrase
- A list of 12 or 24 words that regenerates every private key in a wallet; the single most valuable secret a crypto user holds.
- Self-custody
- Holding your own private keys rather than trusting a company; it removes counterparty risk and makes you fully responsible for security.
- Sequencer
- The operator that orders transactions on a layer 2; usually a single entity, which is most L2s' biggest live trust assumption.
- Sidechain
- A separate blockchain with its own consensus and security, connected to a main chain only by a bridge.
- Slashing
- A protocol penalty that destroys part of a validator's staked coins for provably harmful behaviour such as double-signing.
- Slippage tolerance
- The maximum adverse price move you authorise between submitting a swap and its execution. Set too low the trade reverts; too high and it invites sandwiching.
- Smart contract wallet
- A wallet that is itself a programmable contract, allowing recovery, spending limits and sponsored gas instead of a single fixed key.
- Soft fork
- A protocol change that only tightens the rules, so non-upgraded nodes still accept the new blocks.
- Soft rug
- A project that abandons users gradually rather than stealing outright: the team sells, development stops, and the token bleeds to nothing.
- SOPR
- The ratio of price at which coins are sold to the price at which they were acquired, aggregated across all coins moved that day.
- Stablecoin
- A crypto token designed to hold a fixed value, usually one US dollar, backed by reserves or by algorithms.
- Stableswap pool
- An AMM curve tuned for assets that should trade near parity, offering very low price impact near the peg and steep pricing once it breaks.
- Staking
- Locking crypto to help secure a proof-of-stake network in exchange for periodic rewards, with lockup and slashing risks.
- Stale price
- An oracle value that has not updated recently enough to be trusted, leaving contracts acting on a price the market has already left behind.
- State channel
- A private two-party ledger that settles on-chain only when opened and closed, allowing unlimited instant updates in between.
- Supply in profit
- The share of all coins whose last on-chain movement was at a price below the current one, so the holder is nominally in the black.
- Swap route
- The path a trade takes between pools to get from one token to another, for example A to ETH to USDC rather than a direct A-to-USDC pool.
- Sybil attack
- Creating many fake identities or wallets to gain a disproportionate share of rewards, votes or influence in a permissionless system.
- Terra/UST collapse
- The May 2022 failure of the algorithmic stablecoin UST and its paired token LUNA, which erased roughly $40bn of market value in about a week.
- Testnet
- A parallel copy of a network using worthless coins, where developers and users can test without risking real money.
- Throughput (TPS)
- Transactions per second a chain can process; a headline number that is easy to quote and easy to mislead with.
- Timelock
- A mandatory delay between a governance decision or admin action being approved and it taking effect, giving users a window to react or exit.
- Token approval
- Permission you grant a contract to spend your tokens; often unlimited by default and valid until you revoke it.
- Token burn
- Permanently removing tokens from supply by sending them to an unspendable address or destroying them in the contract.
- Token generation event (TGE)
- The launch moment when a token is first created and distributed, whether by public sale, exchange listing or airdrop.
- Token unlock
- A scheduled release of previously locked tokens to team, investors or the treasury, adding tradable supply on a known date.
- Tokenomics
- The supply, distribution, issuance and demand design of a token; the closest thing crypto has to a capital structure.
- Total crypto market cap
- The summed market value of all crypto assets, often quoted excluding bitcoin (TOTAL2) or bitcoin and stablecoins (TOTAL3) to isolate risk appetite.
- Total supply
- All tokens that currently exist, including locked and unvested ones, minus any that have been burned.
- Total value locked (TVL)
- The dollar value of assets deposited in a protocol or chain. The standard size metric in DeFi, and easy to misread.
- Transaction hash (txid)
- The unique fingerprint of a transaction, used to look it up, prove you sent it, or chase a missing deposit.
- TWAP oracle
- A feed that reports an average price over a window rather than the latest tick, so distorting it requires holding a false price for the whole window.
- Unbonding period
- The waiting time between requesting your staked coins back and being able to move or sell them.
- Utilisation rate
- The share of a lending pool's deposits currently borrowed. It drives interest rates and determines whether depositors can actually withdraw.
- UTXO
- An accounting model where a wallet holds discrete unspent chunks of coin rather than a single running balance.
- Validator
- A node that stakes capital to propose and attest to blocks on a proof-of-stake chain, earning rewards and risking slashing.
- Vault
- A contract that takes deposits and runs a yield strategy on the depositors' behalf, issuing a share token that appreciates as the strategy earns.
- Vesting cliff
- A period during which allocated tokens release nothing at all, after which a large tranche unlocks at once and the rest streams.
- Vote escrow
- Locking governance tokens for a fixed term in exchange for boosted voting power and rewards, with longer locks granting more influence.
- Wallet
- Software or hardware that holds the private keys controlling your crypto; self-custody means you, not an exchange, control the funds.
- Wallet drainer
- Malicious code, usually behind a fake site or airdrop, that tricks you into signing a transaction or approval that empties your wallet.
- Wash trading
- Trading with yourself to manufacture volume or price history, common on unregulated venues and in NFT markets where fees are low or rebated.
- Wash trading
- Illegally trading with yourself, or with a colluding party, to generate volume or prints without any real change in beneficial ownership.
- Whale
- An individual or entity holding enough of an asset that their trades move the market.
- Whale wallet
- An address holding enough of an asset to move its price. Tracked publicly, and far harder to interpret than the alerts suggest.
- Withdrawal freeze
- A venue suspending withdrawals, whether for a technical reason, a network problem, or because it no longer has the assets to honour them.
- Wrapped token
- A token on one chain that represents an asset held elsewhere, redeemable one-for-one if the custodian or contract stays honest.
- Yield farming
- Moving capital between DeFi protocols to capture the best available returns, usually a mix of trading fees, lending interest and token incentives.
- Yield-bearing stablecoin
- A dollar-pegged token that pays a return, whether from Treasury bills, lending, or a derivatives strategy. The yield's source determines the risk.
- ZK rollup
- A rollup that publishes a cryptographic proof that each batch was executed correctly, allowing withdrawals without a challenge window.
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