Glossary
Confused by a term? Look it up here.
Every word here shows up somewhere in the Academy. New to crypto entirely? Start with What Crypto Actually Is instead. This page is for looking something up mid-guide, not for reading start to finish.
- All-Time High (ATH)
- The highest price an asset has ever reached. Current price is often described relative to it.
- Candlestick
- A chart shape showing the open, close, high, and low price for one time period. See Reading a Candlestick Chart.
- CFD (Contract for Difference)
- An agreement with a broker to exchange the difference in an asset’s price, without ever holding the asset itself. Regulated differently from exchange-listed futures.
- Circulating Supply
- The number of coins of an asset that are currently available and in public hands, used to calculate market cap.
- Cold Wallet
- A wallet that keeps your private keys offline, typically a hardware device: more secure, less convenient than a hot wallet.
- Copy Trading
- Automatically mirroring another trader’s positions into your own account, sized proportionally to your balance.
- Cost Basis
- What you originally paid for an asset, used to calculate gain or loss when you dispose of it, often for tax purposes.
- Cross Margin
- A margin mode where your entire account balance backs every open position, rather than each position having its own ring-fenced collateral.
- Dated Futures
- A futures contract with a fixed expiry date, as opposed to a perpetual contract which has none.
- DCA (Dollar-Cost Averaging)
- Buying a fixed amount on a fixed schedule regardless of price, smoothing out your average entry over time.
- DCA Bot
- An automated tool that executes a dollar-cost-averaging schedule for you.
- DeFi (Decentralized Finance)
- Financial services (trading, lending, earning yield) run by smart contracts on a blockchain, with no company holding your funds.
- DEX (Decentralized Exchange)
- A trading venue with no company in the middle: you trade directly against a liquidity pool run by a smart contract.
- Exchange
- A platform where you trade fiat currency for crypto, or one crypto for another (e.g. Kraken, Coinbase, Binance).
- Funding Rate
- A periodic payment exchanged between long and short traders on a perpetual futures contract, keeping its price tethered to spot.
- Grid Bot
- An automated tool that places a ladder of buy/sell orders across a price range, profiting from volatility within that range.
- Hot Wallet
- A wallet connected to the internet (browser extension or app): convenient, but a larger exposure surface than a cold wallet.
- Impermanent Loss
- A risk specific to liquidity pools, where the value of your pooled assets can end up lower than if you’d simply held them.
- Isolated Margin
- A margin mode where a losing position can only drain the collateral you specifically allocated to it.
- Leverage
- Borrowed buying power that multiplies both gains and losses on a position relative to your own capital.
- Limit Order
- An order that only fills at your specified price or better: may not fill immediately, or at all.
- Liquidation Price
- The price at which a leveraged position is forcibly closed because remaining margin can no longer cover the loss.
- Liquidity Provider
- Someone who deposits assets into a DEX pool so others can trade against it, earning a share of trading fees in return.
- Maker Fee
- The fee paid when your order adds liquidity to the order book (e.g. a limit order that doesn’t fill instantly).
- Margin Trading
- Borrowing funds from an exchange to trade a larger position than your own balance would allow.
- Market Cap
- Current price multiplied by circulating supply: the standard way market size is compared across assets.
- Market Order
- An order that executes immediately at the current price, rather than waiting for a specific price.
- Nano Futures
- Small, standardized, dated futures contracts: Coinbase’s CFTC-regulated US derivatives product.
- Options (Call/Put)
- A call gives the right to buy an asset at a set price before expiry; a put gives the right to sell. You pay a premium to hold either.
- Perpetual Futures
- A futures contract with no expiry date, using a funding rate to keep its price tethered to the spot price.
- Position Sizing
- Deciding how much of your account to risk on a single trade, usually the single biggest factor in whether a bad trade is survivable.
- Premium (Options)
- The price paid to buy an options contract: the most a buyer can lose on that position.
- Seed Phrase
- A sequence of words that can regenerate your wallet’s private keys. Whoever holds it controls the funds.
- Self-Custody
- Holding your own crypto in a wallet only you control, rather than leaving it with an exchange.
- Smart Contract
- Code running on a blockchain that automatically executes an agreement: the mechanism behind every DeFi protocol and DEX.
- Spot Trading
- Buying or selling crypto for immediate delivery at the current price: no leverage, you own the asset outright.
- Staking
- Locking crypto to help secure a proof-of-stake network (or via an exchange on your behalf) in exchange for a reward.
- Stop-Loss
- An order that automatically closes a position once price hits a specified level, capping further loss.
- Strike Price
- The fixed price at which an options contract lets you buy (call) or sell (put) the underlying asset.
- Taker Fee
- The fee paid when your order removes liquidity from the order book (e.g. a market order that fills instantly).
- Unified Trading Account
- An account structure (used by Bybit and OKX, among others) where spot, margin, futures, and options share one margin pool.
- Volume (24h)
- The total value traded on an asset over the past 24 hours: a rough proxy for how liquid and actively traded it is.
- Wallet
- Where your crypto is held: either an exchange account (custodial) or one only you control (self-custody).
- Yield Farming
- Supplying assets to a DeFi protocol in exchange for a yield, which carries smart-contract risk on top of ordinary market risk.