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- 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 — carries smart-contract risk on top of ordinary market risk.
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