Crypto Glossary

Cold Storage

Keeping your private keys on a device that never touches the internet, so an online attacker has nothing to reach.

DeFi

Decentralised finance: lending, trading and earning built on smart contracts instead of banks and brokers, open to anyone with a wallet.

Gas Fees

The price you pay for computation on a blockchain. Gas measures how much work your transaction takes; the fee is that work multiplied by the current price per unit.

Halving

The scheduled event, roughly every four years, when the reward miners receive for each Bitcoin block is cut in half — slowing the creation of new coins.

HODL

Crypto slang for holding through volatility instead of trading. It began as a drunken typo for 'hold' in a 2013 forum post and became a strategy label.

Liquidity Pool

A pot of two or more tokens locked in a smart contract that traders swap against. Depositors earn a share of the fees — and take on impermanent loss.

Market Cap

Price multiplied by circulating supply. It ranks coins by total value — but it is not the amount of money invested, and a low price does not mean a coin is cheap.

Mempool

The waiting room for transactions: after you hit send, your transaction sits in the mempool until a miner or validator picks it up and puts it in a block.

Private Key

The secret number that proves you own an address and authorises spending from it. Whoever holds the private key holds the coins.

Satoshi

The smallest unit of bitcoin — one hundred-millionth of a BTC. Named after Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Seed Phrase

The 12 or 24 words that back up your entire wallet. Anyone who has them controls your crypto — and if you lose them, nobody can restore your access.

Smart Contract

A program stored on a blockchain that runs exactly as written when its conditions are met — no company or middleman needed to enforce it.

Stablecoin

A crypto token designed to hold a steady value, almost always one US dollar — used as a safe harbour and as the trading unit of most crypto markets.