Crypto glossary

Terms you actually run into while exchanging, without the parts that do not matter on a first transfer.

A B C D E F G H K L M N P R S T V W

A
AML: Screening against lists of thefts and sanctions. Incoming coins get checked, and a flagged transfer waits until the check closes.
Address: The string money is sent to — 1A1z…, T9yD…. Formats differ by network, and an address from one network is useless in another.
Airdrop: Tokens handed out free to holders or to early users of a protocol. A real one never asks for a key or for a transfer "to verify the wallet".
All-time high: The top price a coin has ever printed. How far below it sits is a fact about the past and nothing more.
Altcoin: Everything that is not Bitcoin. The word grades nothing — it only marks the line.
B
Block: A batch of transactions written to the chain in one go. How often blocks close decides how fast the first confirmation arrives.
Blockchain: A shared ledger kept by many independent machines at once. Entries can be added but not quietly rewritten, which is why anyone can verify a transfer.
Bridge: Moving the same asset between networks — say USDT from Ethereum to TRON. An exchanger does it as one order, with no bridge wallet of your own.
C
Cold wallet: Keys that never touch the internet: a hardware device or paper. Better for storing, worse for spending.
Confirmation: A block stacked on top of the one holding your transaction. Services wait for several, because the newest block can still be replaced.
Custodial wallet: Keys held by a service instead of by you. Convenient right up to the day the service is down or the account is blocked.
D
DeFi: Lending, swaps and derivatives written as smart contracts instead of run by a company. The rules are public code — and so are the bugs in it.
E
Exchanger: A service that swaps one asset for another at its own rate, usually with no registration and no balance kept between orders.
Explorer: A site showing every transaction in a network. Paste a hash into it and you see what actually happened, without trusting a screenshot.
F
Fixed rate: The rate locked when the order is created. The amount does not move while the transfer travels; the service carries that risk and prices it in.
Floating rate: The rate taken at the moment of the swap. Usually a little better, but the final amount shows up only at the end.
G
Gas: The unit of work in Ethereum-style networks. The fee is gas used times gas price, which is why sending a token costs more than sending the network's own coin.
H
Hash: A short fingerprint of data. A transaction hash (TXID) names your transfer and is the first thing support will ask for.
Hot wallet: A wallet on a phone or laptop, online. Good for spending money — which is also the amount worth keeping in it.
K
KYC: Identity checks. Instant exchanges usually skip them, but a flagged transfer or an unusual amount can bring documents into the conversation.
L
Liquidity: How much can be bought or sold without shifting the price. Thin liquidity is why a rare coin gets a worse rate and a lower ceiling.
M
Market capitalisation: Price times the coins in circulation. A measure of size, not of quality, and a large supply inflates it easily.
Memo: An extra field some networks need (TON, XRP, XLM) to tell recipients apart inside one shared address. Send without it and the money has to be recovered by hand, if at all.
Mempool: The queue of transactions waiting for a block. The longer the queue, the less the same fee buys.
Mining: Producing new blocks by spending computing power. Miners take the block reward and the fees — and it is that reward a halving cuts in half.
N
Network: The chain a token lives in: the same USDT exists in TRON, Ethereum, BNB Chain and more. The sending and receiving network must match, or the money does not arrive.
Network fee: What the chain charges to include a transfer, paid in that chain's own coin. It follows the network and its load, not the size of your amount.
Node: A machine that keeps a copy of the chain and checks new blocks. The more independent nodes, the harder it is to rewrite history.
P
Private key: The secret that moves the coins at an address. Whoever reads it can spend them, and no honest service ever needs to see it.
Proof of Stake: Agreeing on blocks by locking coins instead of burning electricity. Validators put their own money at risk and lose part of it for cheating.
Proof of Work: Agreeing on blocks by spending computing power, the Bitcoin way. It makes rewriting history expensive rather than impossible.
R
Reserve: What an exchanger can pay out in a direction right now. A reserve smaller than your amount means waiting or splitting the order.
S
Seed phrase: Twelve or twenty-four words that restore a wallet and every key in it. Paper only — never a chat, a photo, or a form on a site.
Slippage: The gap between the rate you saw and the rate you got, opened by the price moving while the order was processed.
Smart contract: A program living in a chain that runs when it is called. Tokens, bridges and DeFi are all contracts, and a bug in one is a bug in the money.
Stablecoin: A token pinned near a currency, usually the dollar, by reserves or by a mechanism. Used to sit out a storm and to move money between networks.
Staking: Locking coins to support a network and collect a reward. The reward comes in the same coin, so its price still decides the outcome.
T
TXID: The identifier of a transaction. With it anyone can look the transfer up in an explorer and read its status for themselves.
Token: An asset issued inside somebody else's chain, unlike a coin that has a chain of its own. Moving a token is paid for in that chain's coin.
Transaction: A record of funds moving between addresses. Once it is in a block there is no cancel and no recall.
Two-factor authentication: A second check at login, usually a code from an app. It holds the account even after the password leaks.
V
Validator: A participant that proposes and checks blocks in a Proof of Stake network, with its own stake on the line.
Volatility: How far a price swings over a period. High volatility widens the possible gain and the possible loss by exactly the same amount.
W
Wallet: A program or device that keeps keys and signs transfers. The coins live in the chain; the wallet holds the right to move them.
Wrapped token: A stand-in for another asset inside a foreign network — WBTC for Bitcoin in Ethereum. It is worth exactly as much as whoever backs it.

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