HELPFUL CRYPTO 🤑 TERMS

Altcoin
Any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin 

Ask
Limit sell order at a specific price (ask price) 

Bear/bearish
Decrease in price, a trend which primarily moves downwards, or someone that believes the trend will be down 

Bid
Limit buy order at a specific price (bid price) 

Bull/bullish
Increase in price, a trend which primarily moves upwards, or someone that believes the trend will be up 

Delisting
Removal of an asset or trading pair from an exchange 

Dump
Intense sell pressure which rapidly moves the price down 

Divergence
A situation in which the price makes a higher high, while an indicator (such as the RSI, OBV etc.) makes a lower high, or vice versa; this typically indicates a potential trend reversal 

ERC-20 
A technological standard for issuing tokens on the Ethereum blockchain Fiat – Money issued by the government and not backed by e.g. gold 

HODL
Hold on for Dear Life, misspelling of “hold,” which became popular in crypto and refers to holding a cryptocurrency rather than selling 

ICO
Initial Coin Offering, the stage in which a project offers its coin or token to investors before it enters the open market 

IDO
Initial DEX (decentralized exchange) offering, the launch of a token on a decentralized exchange 

IEO
Like an IDO, but held on a centralized exchange 

Index (plural: indices)
An exchange-traded instrument which tracks the price of a number of assets 

Ledger
1. A record of transactions, in this sense blockchain is one type of (distributed and public) ledger; 2. A popular brand of hardware wallets 

Leverage
Trading with a position size larger than your collateral, this can be done either through derivatives (futures or options contracts) or through margin trading on the spot market 

Liquidity
The amount of buy and sell orders on centralized exchanges, or the amount of pooled assets in decentralized exchanges; this affects the ease with which you can buy/sell large amounts without moving the price

Listing
The addition of a new asset or trading pair to an exchange 

Margin trading
Trading with borrowed funds 

Market capitalization (or market cap)
The number of tokens in circulation multiplied by the price of each token 

Mining
Verifying transactions on a blockchain network that uses Proof-of-Work

Moon
An extreme, and often rapid, increase in price 

Node
A network participant which monitors the activity on a blockchain 

Ponzi scheme
A type of fraud in which money from new investors is used to pay back earlier investors; eventually, this inevitably collapses 

Pump
A steep increase in price 

Pump and Dump (P&D)
A type of fraud where insiders slowly buy a large amount of an asset, before convincing retail traders to buy it, driving the price up sharply, and then dumping their assets to make a quick profit 

Satoshi Nakamoto
Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator (or group of creators) 

Satoshi
Smallest unit of Bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC) 

Staking
Locking the native token on a Proof-of-Stake blockchain in order to validate transactions (analogous to mining) 

Total Supply
Total number of tokens in existence Whale – A person or organisation that owns a significant proportion of an asset, which means that they can easily influence its price

Whitelist
A list of individuals or wallet addresses allowed to participate in a service (for example an IEO)

Fiat Currency
Government Issued currency not backed by anything physical

Block
Blocks make up the blockchain, inside each block are a series of transactions

Decentralized
Exactly what it sounds like, there is not central point in the network, Instead it is spread over a series of users (or nodes)

Hard Fork
a radical update to the blockchain. In the past there have been many hard forks in the past but the most notable ones recently where new cryptocurrencies were created are Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold.

Soft work
smaller sscale backwards compatible change in the blockchain protocol

Proof of Work
One of the most common algorithms in cryptocurrency. It requires miners to mine blocks to validate transactions. How bitcoins are created.

Proof of Stake
Another common algorithm that requires users to stake their cryptocurrency to validate transactions

Smart Contracts
digitalized contracts executed on the blockchain

dApps
‘decentralized apps’ applications that are not centralized and work on top of the blockchain

Mining
process of validating a block in return for a reward

Wallet
virtual wallet where people can store crypto

Address
an identifier made up of characters and numbers where you can send and withdraw cryptocurrency from

Public Keys
the key you share with people to receive cryptocurrency

Private Keys
What you use to access your wallet to store your cryptocurrency

Cold Storage
storing private keys offline as a way so it wont get stolen

Paper Wallet
an example of cold storage, public and private keys printed on a piece of paper

Hardware wallet
Safest place to store cryptocurrency, small physical device like the Nano Ledger S

White paper
A white paper is a document that outlines what a cryptocurrency is created to do and how it will achieve it. The first white paper was released by Satoshi Nakamoto detailing Bitcoin. Since then, almost every cryptocurrency has released one

ICO
Stands for ‘Initial Coin Offering’, which is where a new cryptocurrency will give away some coins at a discounted rate in return for another cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin. 

This is usually done to finance the project.

Satoshi
A Satoshi is the smallest denomination of Bitcoin and is equivalent to 100th billionth of one Bitcoin. It was named after Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Exchange
An exchange is where people can go to buy, sell or trade cryptocurrency.

Hash
The function of decrypting information. In cryptocurrency, miners must decrypt hashes to mine blocks. 

The more hashing power you have, the more blocks you can mine and the more block rewards you can receive. 

DDoS attack
DDoS stands for ‘distributed denial of service’. Such attacks attempt to render a site to a halt by overloading it with traffic. Cryptocurrency exchanges are at risk from such attacks.

Stablecoin
A cryptocurrency that is supposedly tied to the value of something else, such as the US dollar, to make it more stable and less volatile in price swings.

Privacy coin
A cryptocurrency where transactions can be made private. Some of the most well-known privacy coins include Monero, Dash, Zcoin.

Utility coin
A cryptocurrency that’s can be used for other purposes aside from transactions. 

For example, Binance Coin can be used on the Binance exchange to get a discount when purchasing other coins.

Block reward
The number of tokens a miner receives for mining a block. The reward can be increased to raise the likeliness of miners validating the transactions faster.

Pump and dump
This is a scam where people - usually the creators who own a large share - encourage others to buy their cryptocurrency to artificially pump the price.

Once the price reaches a high point they are happy with, the scammers sell off all that they own and the price plummets.

Bagholder
This cryptocurrency term is for someone left with a cryptocurrency after a pump and dump.

Node
A computer that works on the blockchain network and helps it stay decentralised.

Masternode
Usually, masternodes work on DPoS blockchains and are responsible for validating transactions.

Gas
A fee for validating a transaction. This cryptocurrency term is mostly used for Ethereum.

On-chain governance
This deals with how the blockchain handles changes. Typically, people can vote new changes into the blockchain to update it to overcome issues.

DAO
Stands for ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation’, this is an organisation, usually made up of developers and shareholders who vote on how the blockchain should develop.

HODL
A drunken misspelling of the word ‘hold’. Now people use it when they say they are going to wait and hold a cryptocurrency.

Whale (or crypto whale)
A whale is an entity that can move large amounts of cryptocurrency in one go. When they do this, it can have a big impact on the market.

Goxxed
When someone leaves their cryptocurrency in an exchange and they get hacked and lose it all.

Peer to peer
A connection between two or more computers. In the case of cryptocurrency, this would be nodes. 

What makes peer to peer so unique to cryptocurrency and blockchain is that there is no middleman between transactions.