Crypto Glossary

The words behind the numbers. Each term gets a one-line answer and a longer explanation. For step-by-step guides, see Learn.

A

Airdrop: Free tokens distributed to wallets, usually to reward early users or spread ownership of a new project.
All-time high (ATH): The highest price a coin has ever traded at.
All-time low (ATL): The lowest price a coin has ever traded at, often in its first days of trading.
Altcoin: Any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin.
Altcoin season: A period when most large altcoins rise faster than Bitcoin.
Automated market maker (AMM): The pricing formula a DEX pool uses to quote a price from the amounts of each token it holds.

Bear market: A long period of falling prices and pessimism, often defined as a drop of 20% or more from the peak.
Bid-ask spread: The difference between the highest price a buyer offers and the lowest price a seller accepts.
Bitcoin dominance: Bitcoin's share of the total crypto market cap.
Blockchain: A shared record of transactions, kept in sync by many independent computers, that is very hard to change after the fact.
Bull market: A long period of rising prices and optimism.

Centralized exchange (CEX): A company that runs an order book, holds customers' funds and matches trades, such as Binance, Coinbase or Kraken.
Circulating supply: The number of coins currently available to trade in the market, excluding tokens that are locked, reserved or burned.
Cold wallet: A wallet whose keys never touch an internet-connected device, typically a hardware device.
Contract address: The unique on-chain address of a token. It is the only reliable way to identify one, since names and symbols can be copied.
Crypto wallet: Software or hardware that holds the keys controlling your crypto and lets you send, receive and sign transactions.

Decentralized exchange (DEX): A trading venue run by smart contracts, where you swap tokens straight from your own wallet without an account.
DeFi (decentralized finance): Financial services such as trading, lending and borrowing run by smart contracts instead of banks or brokers.
DYOR: "Do your own research": check the facts yourself before buying, rather than following tips.

Fear and Greed Index: A 0–100 score of market sentiment, from extreme fear to extreme greed.
FOMO: "Fear of missing out": buying because a price is rising fast and others seem to be getting rich.
FUD: "Fear, uncertainty and doubt": negative claims that spread fear, whether true or not.
Fully diluted valuation (FDV): The market cap a coin would have if every token that will ever exist were already in circulation, at today's price.

Gas fee: The fee paid to a blockchain network to process a transaction or run a smart contract.

Halving: The event, roughly every four years, when Bitcoin's block reward to miners is cut in half.
Honeypot token: A token whose contract lets you buy but quietly blocks or heavily taxes selling.

Impermanent loss: The shortfall a liquidity provider suffers compared with simply holding the two tokens, when their prices move apart.

Layer 1: A base blockchain that processes and settles its own transactions, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana.
Layer 2: A network built on top of a Layer 1 that bundles many transactions together to make them faster and cheaper.
Liquidity: How easily a coin can be bought or sold without moving its price much.
Liquidity pool: A smart contract holding two tokens that traders swap against on a decentralized exchange.

Market cap: A coin's price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation: what the market values everything already out there at.
Max supply: The hard limit on how many coins can ever exist. Some coins have one; many do not.
Memecoin: A token driven mainly by internet culture and community rather than a product or cash flows.

Order book: The live list of buy and sell orders waiting on an exchange at each price.

Private key: The secret number that proves ownership of a crypto address and signs its transactions.
Proof of stake: A way for a blockchain to agree on new blocks where validators are chosen in proportion to the coins they lock up.
Proof of work: A way for a blockchain to agree on new blocks by having miners compete to solve a costly computational puzzle.

Rug pull: A scam where a token's creators drain its liquidity or dump their holdings, leaving buyers with tokens nobody will buy.

Seed phrase: A list of 12 or 24 words that can restore a wallet and everything in it on any device.
Slippage: The difference between the price you expected and the price your trade actually filled at.
Smart contract: A program stored on a blockchain that runs exactly as written when someone interacts with it.
Stablecoin: A token designed to keep a steady value, usually one US dollar.
Staking: Locking up coins to help secure a proof-of-stake network in exchange for rewards.

Token unlock: The scheduled release of tokens that were locked, usually those held by the team, early investors or a foundation.
Total supply: All the coins that exist right now, including locked and reserved ones, minus any that have been burned.
Trading volume: The total value of a coin bought and sold over a period, usually the last 24 hours.

Vesting: A schedule that releases locked tokens gradually instead of all at once.
Volatility: How much and how fast a price swings.
Volume / market cap ratio: Daily trading volume divided by market cap: a quick gauge of how actively a coin trades for its size.

Whale: A wallet holding enough of a coin to move its price with a single trade.
Wrapped token: A token that represents another asset one-for-one on a different blockchain, such as Bitcoin on Ethereum.