Crypto Glossary: The Complete Dictionary of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Terms

Understanding cryptocurrency can feel overwhelming with so many new words, acronyms, and technical concepts. This crypto glossary is designed to help beginners and experts alike by providing clear definitions of essential cryptocurrency terms, blockchain concepts, and DeFi jargon. Whether you’re exploring Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, stablecoins, or Web3 projects, this guide covers everything you need to know in one place.

From fundamental ideas like addresses and wallets to advanced topics such as account abstraction, sharding, and consensus mechanisms, this glossary will serve as your go-to reference for navigating the fast-changing world of digital assets.

A

• ‍ABI (Application Binary Interface): A machine-readable guide that defines how to call functions and interact with a specific smart contract.‍
• Account Abstraction: A feature that allows user wallets to function like smart contracts, enabling more flexible security and usability features.‍
• Account-Based Model: A blockchain structure (used by Ethereum) where the ledger tracks the balance of each account directly.‍
• Accrued Interest: Interest that has been earned on a deposit in a DeFi protocol but has not yet been claimed or paid out.‍
• Accumulation: A market phase where investors buy an asset over time, often after a price drop and before a potential rise.‍
• Active Management: A strategy for a crypto fund or portfolio that involves frequent trading and rebalancing to maximize returns.‍
• Actors (Actor Model): Independent computational entities with their own state that communicate via messages, used as an architectural model for some blockchains.‍
• Acyclicity: The property of a network where paths do not loop back on themselves; the foundation of DAG-based cryptocurrencies.‍
• Ad Valorem Fee: A transaction fee based on a percentage of the transaction’s total value, rather than a flat or computational fee.‍
• Adaptive Chosen-Ciphertext Attack (CCA2): A stringent cryptographic security model testing whether an encryption scheme can resist attacks where the adversary can decrypt chosen messages.‍
• Adaptive State Sharding: A dynamic scaling solution where the number of blockchain shards automatically adjusts based on network demand.‍
• Address: A unique string of characters used to send and receive cryptocurrency, similar to a bank account number.‍
• Address Poisoning: A scam that involves sending a tiny transaction from a lookalike address to trick a user into copying it later.‍
• Adversarial Mining: Malicious actions taken by miners to disrupt the network, such as selfish mining or block withholding.‍
• Adversary: A malicious actor in a network who attempts to disrupt its normal operation or compromise its security.‍
• AER (Annual Equivalent Rate): The standardized way platforms show how much interest you actually earn on savings in a year. It includes compounding, so you can compare accounts fairly, even if they pay monthly, quarterly, or annually
• ‍Affinity: In network analysis, the likelihood that two nodes or participants will interact with each other.‍
• Agent: An autonomous program or bot that performs a specific task within a decentralized system, like a liquidation bot.‍
• Aggregation Theory: A business model where a platform gains power by aggregating users and liquidity, such as a DEX aggregator.‍
• Aggregator: A tool that combines data or liquidity from multiple sources to offer users the best price for a trade or loan.‍
• Agnostic: Describes a platform or protocol designed to be compatible with multiple blockchains.‍
• Airdrop: A marketing strategy of sending free tokens to wallet addresses to build awareness and a user base.‍
• Airdrop Hunter: A person who actively seeks out and participates in projects specifically to receive airdropped tokens.‍
• Algorithm: A set of rules that a blockchain follows for cryptographic operations like hashing and transaction validation.‍
• Algorithmic Stablecoin: A stablecoin that uses algorithms to control its supply and maintain a price peg, rather than being backed by collateral.
• All-Time High (ATH): The highest price a cryptocurrency has ever reached.‍
• All-Time Low (ATL): The lowest price a cryptocurrency has ever reached.‍
• Allocation: The designated portion of a project’s total token supply assigned to specific groups or purposes (e.g., team, investors).‍
• Alpha: Valuable or insider information that gives a trader a competitive edge.‍
• Alphanumeric: A combination of letters and numbers, used to represent crypto addresses, private keys, and transaction hashes.‍
• Altcoin: Any cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin.‍
• Amdahl’s Law: A principle that describes the potential speedup of a system when only part of it is improved, often cited in scalability debates.‍
• AML (Anti-Money Laundering): Regulations and procedures designed to prevent the concealment of illegally obtained funds.‍
• AMM (Automated Market Maker): The underlying protocol for decentralized exchanges that uses liquidity pools to enable automated trading.‍
• Amortization: The process of spreading out costs, rewards, or token emissions over a set period to stabilize economic impact.‍
• Ancestor Block: Any block that comes before a specific block in the same blockchain, forming its historical lineage.‍
• Angel Investor: An early-stage investor who provides capital to a startup in exchange for equity or future tokens.‍
• Anti-Fragility: A quality where a system, like Bitcoin, becomes stronger when exposed to stress, volatility, and shocks.‍
• Apeing / Ape In : Slang for impulsively buying a token or NFT with little research, usually driven by hype.‍
• API (Application Programming Interface): A software intermediary that allows different applications to communicate and share data.‍
• Application Layer: The top layer of the blockchain stack where user-facing DApps and smart contracts run.‍
• APR (Annual Percentage Rate): The yearly rate of return on an investment, not including the effect of compounding interest.‍
• APY (Annual Percentage Yield): The yearly rate of return on an investment that includes the effect of compounding interest.‍
• Arbitrage: A trading strategy of profiting from price differences of the same asset across different exchanges.‍
• Archive Node: A blockchain node that stores the complete history of all states, from the genesis block to the present.‍
• ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit): Specialized hardware designed for the single purpose of mining a specific cryptocurrency efficiently.‍
• ASIC Resistance: A feature of a mining algorithm that makes it unprofitable for ASIC hardware, promoting decentralization.‍
• Ask Price: The lowest price a seller is willing to accept for an asset on an exchange’s order book.‍
• Asset: Any digital coin, token, or NFT that has economic value.‍
• Asset-Backed Token: A digital token collateralized by and representing a claim on a real-world asset like gold, real estate, or stocks.
  
• Asymmetric Encryption: A cryptographic system using a pair of keys: a public key for receiving and a private key for signing or accessing.‍
• Asynchronous: A process where network operations can occur independently without being in perfect sync, often for scalability.‍
• Atomic Swap: A trustless, direct exchange of two different cryptocurrencies between two users without a central intermediary.‍
• Attack Surface: The total number of potential points where a system (like a smart contract) could be vulnerable to an attack.‍
• Attacker’s Advantage: The statistical probability that a malicious actor can successfully attack a blockchain network.‍
• Attestation: A declaration made by a validator to confirm the validity of a block in a Proof of Stake network.‍
• Auction: A method of selling tokens or NFTs, such as a Dutch Auction where the price starts high and decreases over time.‍
• Auction Crier: An automated bot in a DeFi protocol that initiates and manages liquidation auctions for under-collateralized loans.‍
• Audit (Smart Contract Audit): An independent security review of a smart contract’s code to find and fix vulnerabilities before deployment.‍
• Augmented Bonding Curve (ABC): An advanced mathematical model used in DeFi to manage a token’s price in relation to its supply.‍
• Authenticated Data Structure (ADS): A data structure like a Merkle Tree that allows for efficient verification of data from an untrusted source.‍
• Autonomous Agent: An independent software entity that can own assets and interact with smart contracts without direct human control.‍
• Availability Problem: The challenge of ensuring that all necessary transaction data for a block is published and accessible for verification.‍
• Avalanche Consensus: A high-speed consensus protocol that uses repeated random subsampling to quickly validate transactions.
  
• Ax-Schoof Algorithm: A specialized algorithm in elliptic curve cryptography used for generating secure cryptographic keys.

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