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Plain-English definitions of the crypto terms you’ll meet across Crypto House — from blockchain and stablecoins to gas, staking and DYOR. Honest and jargon-free. New to crypto? Начать с «Изучить крипту» →
51% Attack Advanced
A 51% attack is a scenario where a single party gains control of most of a blockchain's mining or staking power and can disrupt the network, for example by reversing some recent transactions. Read more →
Airdrop Beginner
An airdrop is a distribution of free tokens sent to many wallet addresses, usually to promote a project, reward early users, or spread ownership. Read more →
Altcoin Beginner
Altcoin is a catch-all term for any cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin, spanning major platforms down to tiny speculative tokens. Read more →
Automated Market Maker (AMM) Intermediate
An automated market maker, or AMM, is the technology behind many decentralised exchanges, pricing trades from pools of assets and a formula instead of a traditional order book. Read more →
APR Beginner
APR, short for annual percentage rate, states a yearly rate of return or cost as a plain figure, leaving out the extra boost that compounding would add. Read more →
APY Beginner
APY, or annual percentage yield, is the yearly return on a deposit including the effect of compounding, where your rewards themselves begin earning further rewards. Read more →
Arbitrage Intermediate
Arbitrage is the practice of profiting from a price difference for the same asset across different markets by buying where it is cheaper and selling where it is dearer. Read more →
All-Time High (ATH) Beginner
An all-time high, or ATH, is the highest price an asset has ever reached. Read more →
All-Time Low (ATL) Beginner
An all-time low, or ATL, is the lowest price an asset has ever traded at since it launched. Read more →
Bear Market Beginner
A bear market is a prolonged period of falling prices and widespread pessimism. Read more →
Bitcoin Beginner
Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency and the largest by value, launched in 2009 as digital money that no government or company controls. Read more →
Spot Bitcoin ETF Intermediate
A spot Bitcoin ETF is a regulated fund, traded on a stock exchange, that holds actual bitcoin and lets investors gain exposure to its price through an ordinary brokerage account. Read more →
Block Beginner
A block is a batch of confirmed transactions bundled together and added to a blockchain as one permanent, timestamped record. Read more →
Block Explorer Beginner
A block explorer is a free website that lets anyone search and read a blockchain's public records, from a single transaction to whole blocks and wallet balances. Read more →
Block Reward Intermediate
A block reward is the new cryptocurrency a network pays to whoever successfully adds the next block, and it is how most coins first enter circulation. Read more →
Blockchain Beginner
A blockchain is a record of transactions kept in sync across a large network of computers, so no single party owns or controls the history. Read more →
Cross-Chain Bridge Intermediate
A cross-chain bridge is a tool that moves assets or data between two separate blockchains, letting value flow between networks that cannot natively talk to one another. Read more →
Bull Market Beginner
A bull market is a sustained stretch of rising prices and broad optimism. Read more →
Candlestick Intermediate
A candlestick is a chart symbol that shows the open, high, low and close of a price over one period of time. Read more →
CBDC Intermediate
A CBDC, short for central bank digital currency, is national money in digital form, issued and stood behind by a country's own central bank. Read more →
Centralised Exchange (CEX) Beginner
A centralised exchange, or CEX, is a company that lets you buy, sell and store crypto through an account, holding your funds on your behalf. Read more →
Circulating Supply Beginner
Circulating supply is the number of a cryptocurrency's coins that are currently available and in public hands, as opposed to locked, reserved or not yet issued. Read more →
Cold Storage Intermediate
Cold storage means keeping the keys to your crypto completely offline, out of reach of internet-based attacks. Read more →
Cold Wallet Beginner
A cold wallet keeps your crypto keys completely offline, trading a little convenience for much stronger protection against online theft. Read more →
Consensus Mechanism Intermediate
A consensus mechanism is how a leaderless blockchain gets thousands of independent, mutually-distrustful computers to agree on one valid transaction history. Read more →
Custodial Beginner
Custodial means a third party, usually an exchange, holds the private keys to your crypto on your behalf rather than you holding them yourself. Read more →
DAO Advanced
A DAO, or decentralised autonomous organisation, is a community run through token-holder votes and smart contracts rather than a traditional management hierarchy. Read more →
dApp Beginner
A dApp, or decentralised application, is software whose core logic lives in blockchain smart contracts rather than on a company's private servers. Read more →
Decentralisation Beginner
Decentralisation is the practice of spreading a network's control across many independent participants, so that no single company or person can dictate or shut it down. Read more →
Decentralised Exchange (DEX) Intermediate
A decentralised exchange, or DEX, lets people trade crypto directly from their own wallets through smart contracts, with no company holding their funds. Read more →
DeFi Intermediate
DeFi, short for decentralised finance, is a set of financial services such as trading, lending and earning yield built on public blockchains instead of banks. Read more →
Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) Beginner
Dollar-cost averaging is the practice of investing a fixed amount at regular intervals, rather than all at once, to smooth out the effect of a volatile price. Read more →
Bitcoin Dominance Intermediate
Bitcoin dominance is Bitcoin's share of the entire crypto market's value, watched to gauge whether money is favouring Bitcoin or flowing into other coins. Read more →
DYOR Beginner
DYOR stands for "do your own research" — a reminder to verify claims independently before acting on them. Read more →
ERC-20 Intermediate
ERC-20 is the technical standard most Ethereum tokens follow, a shared template of rules that lets wallets and apps handle any of them in the same way. Read more →
Ethereum Beginner
Ethereum is the leading programmable blockchain and the home of most smart contracts, tokens and decentralised applications. Its native coin is ether (ETH). Read more →
Индекс страха и жадности Beginner
The Fear and Greed Index condenses crypto market sentiment into a single number from 0 to 100, ranging from extreme fear to extreme greed. Read more →
Fiat Currency Beginner
Fiat is government-issued money, such as the US dollar or euro, that is not backed by a physical commodity. Read more →
Fork Intermediate
In crypto, a fork is what happens when a blockchain's software rules are changed, an event that can range from a routine upgrade to a permanent split of the network into two separate chains. Read more →
FUD Beginner
FUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt, referring to negative information or sentiment that spreads worry about a coin or the market. Read more →
Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) Intermediate
Fully diluted valuation is what a cryptocurrency would be worth if every coin that will ever exist were already in circulation at the current price. Read more →
Gas Intermediate
Gas is the fee paid to process a transaction on Ethereum, priced in a tiny unit of ether called gwei. Read more →
Genesis Block Intermediate
Every blockchain traces back to a single origin block, and that founding record, hard-coded rather than mined, is known as the genesis block. Read more →
Governance Token Intermediate
A governance token gives its holders the right to vote on decisions about a crypto project or protocol, from fee settings to how a shared treasury is spent. Read more →
Halving Intermediate
The Bitcoin halving is a scheduled event, roughly every four years, that cuts the reward miners earn for adding a new block in half. Read more →
Hardware Wallet Beginner
A hardware wallet is a small physical device that keeps your private keys offline and signs transactions without exposing them to a connected computer. Read more →
Hash Intermediate
A hash is a fixed-length string of characters produced by running data through a one-way mathematical function, acting as a unique digital fingerprint for that data. Read more →
Hash Rate Intermediate
Hash rate measures the total computing power defending a proof-of-work network, counted as the number of guesses all its miners make every second combined. Read more →
HODL Beginner
HODL is crypto slang for holding an asset through ups and downs rather than trading it, born from a misspelling of hold in a 2013 forum post. Read more →
Hot Wallet Beginner
A hot wallet is a crypto wallet that stays connected to the internet, which makes it convenient for everyday use but more exposed to online threats. Read more →
Impermanent Loss Advanced
Impermanent loss is the shortfall a liquidity provider can suffer when the tokens they deposited into a pool change in price relative to each other, leaving them worse off than simply holding. Read more →
KYC Beginner
KYC stands for know your customer: the identity check a regulated exchange runs to confirm who you are before it grants full access to its services. Read more →
Layer 1 Intermediate
A layer 1 is a base blockchain, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, that settles its own transactions and supplies the security everything built on top depends on. Read more →
Layer 2 Intermediate
Layer 2 refers to a network that sits on top of a base blockchain, taking transactions off it to cut fees and boost speed while settling back to the layer 1 for security. Read more →
Leverage Advanced
Leverage is borrowing to increase the size of a trade beyond your own capital, which magnifies both potential gains and potential losses. Read more →
Liquidation Advanced
Liquidation is the forced closing of a leveraged or borrowed position when losses erode the collateral backing it below a required level. Read more →
Liquidity Intermediate
Liquidity is how easily an asset can be bought or sold without noticeably moving its price. Read more →
Liquidity Pool Intermediate
A liquidity pool is a shared pot of two or more tokens locked in a smart contract that a decentralised exchange uses to let people trade without a traditional order book. Read more →
Mainnet Beginner
Mainnet is a blockchain's live, real-money network, where transactions carry genuine value, in contrast to a testnet used only for practice. Read more →
Market Capitalisation Beginner
Market capitalisation is a coin's price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation, giving a rough measure of its total size. Read more →
Mempool Intermediate
The mempool is a network's waiting room for transactions that have been broadcast but not yet included in a block. Read more →
Metaverse Beginner
The metaverse is a broad idea for immersive, persistent virtual worlds where people meet, play and own digital assets, sometimes using crypto and NFTs. Read more →
Mining Intermediate
Mining is the process of using computing power to validate transactions and secure a proof-of-work blockchain such as Bitcoin. Read more →
Mining Pool Intermediate
A mining pool is a group of miners who combine their computing power and share the rewards, smoothing out the luck involved in mining alone. Read more →
Moving Average Intermediate
A moving average is a technical-analysis line that smooths out price by continuously averaging it over a set period, helping reveal the underlying trend. Read more →
NFT Beginner
An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a unique blockchain token used to represent ownership of a specific item such as digital art or a collectible. Read more →
Node Intermediate
A node is any computer running a blockchain's software and holding a copy of its ledger; together, nodes form the decentralised network that enforces the rules. Read more →
On-Chain Beginner
On-chain describes any activity recorded directly on a blockchain's public ledger, as opposed to off-chain activity that is handled somewhere else. Read more →
Oracle Intermediate
An oracle is the bridge that carries outside information, most often asset prices, onto a blockchain so smart contracts can act on facts from beyond their own network. Read more →
Order Book Beginner
An order book is a live list of all the buy and sell orders for an asset, showing the prices people are willing to trade at and how much they want. Read more →
Peg Beginner
A peg is a fixed target value that an asset, most commonly a stablecoin, is designed to hold, such as one token always aiming to equal one US dollar. Read more →
Private Key Intermediate
A private key is the secret that controls a crypto wallet and authorises every transaction sent from it. Read more →
Proof of Stake Intermediate
Proof of stake is a consensus method where validators lock up the network's own coin as a deposit for the chance to add blocks and earn rewards, replacing mining's energy race. Read more →
Proof of Work Intermediate
Proof of work is a consensus method where computers, called miners, race to solve a hard mathematical puzzle for the right to add the next block and earn its reward. Read more →
Протокол Beginner
In crypto, a protocol is the shared rulebook and software that defines how a blockchain network runs, from validating transactions to issuing new coins. Read more →
Public Key Intermediate
A public key is the shareable half of a wallet's key pair, used to derive the address others send crypto to, without exposing the secret private key. Read more →
Pump and Dump Intermediate
A pump and dump is a manipulation scheme where organisers hype a coin to inflate its price, then sell into the frenzy, leaving latecomers with heavy losses. Read more →
RSI (Relative Strength Index) Advanced
RSI, the Relative Strength Index, is a momentum indicator that measures how fast and how far a price has moved recently, on a scale from 0 to 100. Read more →
Rug Pull Intermediate
A rug pull is a scam in which a project's creators abandon it and run off with investors' money, often after luring in funds with a promising-looking token. Read more →
Satoshi Beginner
A satoshi is the smallest unit of bitcoin, one hundred-millionth of a single coin, named after Bitcoin's pseudonymous and still-unidentified creator. Read more →
Seed Phrase Beginner
A seed phrase is a list of 12 or 24 ordinary words that acts as the master backup for a self-custody wallet. Read more →
Sharding Advanced
Sharding is a way to scale a blockchain by dividing its workload into parallel sections, called shards, so many transactions can be handled at once instead of one at a time. Read more →
Slippage Intermediate
Slippage is the difference between the price you expect for a trade and the price you actually get, usually caused by the market moving or by thin liquidity. Read more →
Smart Contract Intermediate
A smart contract is code stored on a blockchain that runs automatically when its conditions are met, with no middleman. Read more →
Стейблкоин Beginner
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency engineered to hold a steady value, almost always pegged to a national currency such as the US dollar. Read more →
Staking Intermediate
Staking means locking up coins on a proof-of-stake network to help secure it, earning rewards in return. Read more →
Support and Resistance Intermediate
Support and resistance are price levels where a market has repeatedly stopped falling (support) or stopped rising (resistance) in the past. Read more →
Testnet Beginner
A testnet is a practice copy of a blockchain that runs on valueless coins, letting developers experiment and test features without risking real money. Read more →
Token Beginner
A token is a crypto asset that lives on top of an existing blockchain through its smart contracts, rather than being that chain's own native coin. Read more →
Tokenomics Intermediate
Tokenomics is the economics of a crypto token: how many exist, how they are distributed, and what they are actually used for. Read more →
Total Value Locked (TVL) Intermediate
Total value locked, usually shortened to TVL, adds up the worth of every crypto asset deposited in a DeFi protocol and serves as a rough gauge of its size and use. Read more →
UTXO Advanced
A UTXO, or unspent transaction output, is a discrete chunk of cryptocurrency left over from a previous transaction that can be used as input to a new one. Read more →
Validator Intermediate
On a proof-of-stake network, a validator is the participant that locks up coins as collateral to check transactions and help produce new blocks, earning rewards for honest work. Read more →
Волатильность Beginner
Volatility describes how sharply and how quickly a price moves up and down. Read more →
Wallet Beginner
A crypto wallet is the software or hardware that stores the keys controlling your cryptocurrency and lets you send and receive it. Read more →
Web3 Beginner
Web3 is a broad term for a blockchain-based internet where users own their data and assets directly, rather than depending on a handful of large platforms. Read more →
Whale Beginner
A whale is an individual or entity that holds a very large amount of a cryptocurrency, enough that their trades can move the market on their own. Read more →
Whitepaper Beginner
A whitepaper is the founding document a crypto project publishes to explain what it does, how its technology works, and how its token is designed. Read more →
Yield Farming Advanced
Yield farming describes actively shuffling crypto between DeFi protocols in pursuit of the best returns on offer, from lending and liquidity provision to token-reward schemes. Read more →
ZK-Rollup Advanced
A ZK-rollup is a layer 2 scaling method that bundles many transactions off-chain and posts a cryptographic proof to the base chain, cutting fees while inheriting its security. Read more →