Glossar

Distribution of tokens to addresses, sometimes unsolicited. Receiving an asset does not authenticate a linked claim website.

Permission for a spender to transfer a specified token on an owner's behalf. It can persist after one trade.

Automated market maker: a system that uses liquidity pools and pricing rules to execute trades.

An evidence-based connection between an account, action and responsible party. A transfer alone seldom identifies the human owner.

The version, components and assumptions included in a review, together with what the review excludes.

A derivatives venue's mechanism for reducing selected opposing positions when its liquidation and backstop arrangements cannot absorb a loss. The ranking and execution rules are venue-specific. An account can therefore have a profitable position reduced even when that account itself has not breached maintenance margin.

Placing a transaction immediately after another to capture a resulting opportunity, such as arbitrage. It can restore prices while transferring value to whoever controls or wins ordering.

The legal pool of rights and property administered in an insolvency. Customers may receive claims against the estate rather than direct return of each asset they deposited.

In derivatives accounting, the price at which the margin allocated to a position would be exhausted under the applicable calculation. It is distinct from the liquidation trigger. Price gaps and execution costs can make liquidation proceeds insufficient, leaving the venue's loss-allocation mechanism to handle the shortfall.

Under Ethereum's EIP-1559, a protocol-determined fee per unit of gas that adjusts with block utilisation and is burned. It is separate from the priority fee. A transaction's fee cap limits what the sender authorises; the cap is not necessarily the amount ultimately paid.

The person or group that ultimately directs an asset or account even when formal ownership is split across nominees or addresses. It requires evidence beyond transaction proximity.

The person or entity with the underlying economic interest, which may differ from a custodian or transaction signer.

A data object introduced for Ethereum by EIP-4844, with a separate fee market and limited data-availability period. Rollups can use blobs to publish transaction data more economically. Blob data is not ordinary EVM contract storage, and long-term retrieval requires a separate retention strategy.

A service that indexes chain data and presents decoded transactions, tokens and labels. It is a useful view, but labels and interpretation come from the service and should be checked against raw chain data.

New bitcoin that a valid block may create under the issuance schedule. It is one component of the miner's block reward; transaction fees are the other. The subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks. A miner cannot make an excessive subsidy valid simply by adding more proof of work.

A mechanism connecting activity or assets across chains, with its own verification and custody assumptions.

A signer or node whose approval contributes to accepting a cross-chain message. A small threshold or shared operator can concentrate control over assets on several networks.

An ERC-4337 participant that selects UserOperations and submits them to the EntryPoint in a transaction. A bundler supplies a path to inclusion rather than ownership of the user's account. Availability, validation rules and fee incentives affect whether an operation will be accepted and submitted.

Read-only input bytes supplied to an EVM contract call. Decoding reveals the selected function and arguments, while internal calls and later state effects require further tracing.

Crypto-asset service provider. Under MiCA, authorisation concerns a specific legal entity and its permitted services.

A network identifier. Similar addresses on different networks do not make their balances interchangeable.

A transaction output returning the unspent remainder of selected Bitcoin inputs to the spender's control. Inputs are consumed in full, so a payment commonly creates both a recipient output and a change output. Identifying change from transaction patterns is an inference, not proof of who owns an address.

A control that pauses or limits selected operations during abnormal conditions. It can contain an incident while concentrating emergency power in whoever controls the switch.

The supply measure a data provider treats as circulating. Methodologies and exclusions can differ.

The date used to value or determine a bankruptcy claim under applicable orders and rules. Later asset-price changes do not automatically change a claim fixed in another currency.

A legal mechanism seeking return of certain pre-bankruptcy transfers. Whether a transfer is recoverable depends on jurisdiction, timing, recipient and applicable defences.

A scheduled point at which a previously restricted token allocation begins to unlock or becomes available.

A parameter limiting how much debt an asset can support. It reflects protocol risk assumptions and can change through governance or administration.

Liquidity allocated to selected price ranges. A position can hold value outside the active range.

The number of blocks built after the block containing a transaction. Greater depth usually reduces ordinary reorganisation risk, but the relationship depends on consensus and attacker capability.

The network-specific identifier of a deployed contract. A token name is not a substitute for it.

The chance that a follower's timing, prices and costs differ materially from those of the observed trader.

A party that controls or administers assets for others, introducing account and counterparty dependencies.

An organisation using onchain governance mechanisms. Public voting does not ensure widely distributed control.

Whether the data required to reconstruct or verify a system's state can be obtained.

An EVM operation that runs another contract's code while using the caller's storage and execution context. It enables proxies and modularity but can hand full state control to the selected implementation.

A deviation from an asset's intended reference value, such as a stablecoin trading below one dollar.

A sequence describing which child keys a hierarchical deterministic wallet derives from root material. The same recovery phrase used with another path can show different accounts, so recovery requires network, scheme and path information.

Decentralised exchange. Its contracts, frontend, administrators and liquidity providers still need separate evaluation.

Cryptographic evidence that a private key authorised specific data. A valid signature proves control of the key for that message; it does not prove that the signer understood the message or that the surrounding website was honest.

An amount required to be surrendered under a legal resolution, distinct from a penalty or compensation to every buyer.

A restriction or competing claim affecting an asset, such as a pledge securing a loan. An asset can exist while being unavailable to meet ordinary customer withdrawals. A reserve assessment therefore needs information about rights and obligations as well as evidence that the reported assets are present.

Indexed data emitted during EVM execution for applications and explorers. Logs support search and interpretation but do not themselves enforce balances or prove the truth of human-readable labels.

The counterparties or pool assets available when a holder sells. Headline valuation is not a measure of it.

Public derivation material that can generate a branch of addresses without spending authority. Exposure can reveal balances and transaction history across that branch and can become dangerous when combined with certain child private keys.

A mechanism for challenging an invalid rollup state claim under specified rules. Its protection depends on more than a published verifier: data must be available, challenges must be possible, and the protocol's time limits and permissions must be understood. Implementations differ in their upgrade and operational controls.

Fully diluted valuation: price multiplied by a broader token supply assumption, often total or maximum supply.

The degree to which a transaction or state is considered settled under a system's rules and assumptions.

A consensus component that applies votes or checkpoints to finalise blocks under defined assumptions. It does not protect application code or external bridges from their own faults.

Uncollateralised liquidity that must be repaid within the same atomic transaction. It amplifies available capital but becomes an exploit only when another component accepts a manipulable or inconsistent state.

A permission that can restrict token accounts under a token programme's rules.

Placing an action before a known pending action to capture an advantage. Proof requires ordering and information evidence; an earlier timestamp alone does not establish how the actor learned about the later order.

A periodic payment mechanism used by perpetual futures to encourage their price to track a reference market. The payer, calculation, interval and caps depend on the venue. Funding is separate from trading fees and price profit or loss; a trade can lose money despite receiving funding.

A measure or charge for network computation and execution. Paying no gas for a signature does not make it harmless.

The participation requirement for a governance decision, whose exact definition depends on the system.

An account or party with a defined role in recovery or approval. Guardians can reduce the risk of losing 1 key but can also collude, be socially engineered or use an overly powerful recovery path.

A scheduled reduction in Bitcoin's block subsidy. The interval is measured in blocks, so calendar dates are approximate until the relevant block arrives. A halving changes new issuance, not the supply already held by investors, and does not establish a rule for the market price.

A protocol-specific measure of a collateralised position's margin before liquidation conditions are met.

Initial coin offering: a token fundraising arrangement whose rights and distribution terms require examination.

The difference between a liquidity position's value and a comparison strategy holding the same initial assets, before or after fees as explicitly defined. The word impermanent does not prevent the loss becoming realised on withdrawal.

The code address to which a proxy delegates execution. Users interact with the proxy address, so the active implementation and its upgrade history must be resolved separately.

A reference assembled from selected external markets. Constituents, weights, outages, stale data and exclusions determine whether it represents the market during stress.

A service that organises blockchain data for queries and interfaces. Its view may be delayed or incomplete.

Rules that change borrowing and lending rates according to utilisation or other state. Advertised annual rates can move sharply and do not guarantee a fixed return.

A call made by contract execution rather than submitted as a separate top-level transaction. Explorers reconstruct these traces from execution; they are not standalone signed transactions.

Key opinion leader: a person whose audience gives them distribution power. The label does not demonstrate expertise or independence.

A scaling system relying on a base chain for part of settlement or security; implementations have different assumptions.

Present obligations to customers, lenders and other claimants. Reserve analysis requires a complete and consistently valued liability set rather than only public wallet balances.

Software that verifies compact chain evidence instead of trusting a full remote account of state. Its assumptions depend on the consensus, headers and checkpoints it verifies.

A transferable token representing a position in a staking arrangement. Its value and exit route depend on the issuer's accounting, protocol rules and liquidity. Selling it on a market is different from redeeming through the protocol. Neither route necessarily provides an immediate exit at the displayed reference value.

The discount or reward given to a liquidator for closing an unhealthy position. It protects execution incentives while transferring additional value from the borrower.

The ability to trade an amount with acceptable execution. It depends on size, price, timing and market structure.

An allocation of assets to a pool, sometimes within a selected price range and controlled by a position owner.

Debt divided by the assessed value of collateral. Borrowing limits and liquidation thresholds may use different ratios, and oracle changes alter the result without any new borrowing.

A transferable representation of a liquidity position in some pool designs. Whoever controls it may be able to redeem underlying reserves, subject to protocol rules.

The minimum equity required to keep a leveraged position open under a venue's rules. Falling below it can trigger liquidation. The relevant equity calculation may include other positions, collateral haircuts, fees and funding. It should not be confused with the higher margin needed to open a position.

A reference used by a derivatives venue for unrealised profit, margin and liquidation. It may combine indexes, impact prices and clamps rather than equal the latest trade.

A valuation using a reference market price. It does not prove that the position was sold for that amount.

Price multiplied by a stated supply measure, not total money invested or available for withdrawal.

A participant or firm providing trading liquidity, often under an inventory, spread or fee arrangement.

A node's collection of valid transactions waiting for inclusion. There is no single universal mempool, and private order flow can hide transactions from ordinary observers.

The component deciding whether a cross-chain message is authentic and final enough to execute. A bug or compromised signer set can create destination claims without source backing.

An address or identifier through which an NFT's metadata may be retrieved. The metadata can point onward to an image or other media. Token ownership, metadata mutability and content availability are separate questions. A persistent token record does not automatically preserve the associated offchain files.

Value obtained by selecting, inserting, excluding or reordering transactions. The term covers arbitrage and liquidations as well as harmful extraction, so the exact action and victim impact should be named.

In Solana token analysis, the account identifying a token and its issuance properties. It is not a holder wallet.

A permission to issue additional token units under the applicable programme or contract rules.

An authority requiring a threshold of signatures. The signers are not necessarily independent people or organisations.

A value used to distinguish operations or prevent replay in a particular protocol. Its meaning depends on context.

A mechanism supplying external information, often prices, to a contract.

A transaction removing or transferring a particular owner role. It proves only that named role changed; proxy administrators, mint authorities, modules and privileged lists may remain.

An account or role able to suspend contract functions. Review must identify which actions pause, which continue, who can resume and whether the authority can freeze user exits.

An ERC-4337 contract that can cover gas costs for UserOperations under its own conditions. Sponsorship may depend on an app, token payment or service policy. A sponsored transaction still executes with consequences for the account; absence of an upfront native-token fee does not establish safety.

A Token-2022 authority that can transfer or burn tokens from any account for that mint. Holders cannot revoke it from their individual token account.

A signed authorisation that can establish or use token spending permission, depending on the mechanism.

Profit and loss. A useful figure specifies its period, cost basis, fees and realised versus unrealised treatment.

The effect of an order's size on execution through available liquidity.

A mechanism that supplies external or derived values to contracts. Source markets, update rules, staleness checks and administrator overrides determine how safely the value can support credit or settlement.

The part of an Ethereum transaction's execution fee intended to compensate the block producer, in addition to the burned base fee. The amount actually paid is constrained by the transaction's fee settings. A larger fee cannot fix a transaction that fails a contract's own conditions.

Tokens obtained under negotiated terms before or apart from public-market purchases.

Secret signing material used to authorise actions under an account or script. Exposure normally cannot be repaired by changing a password; the assets and permissions must be moved to keys generated in a trusted environment.

Evidence that specified assets exist and are controlled at a point in time. It does not establish complete liabilities, ownership rights, encumbrances or future access unless those are included separately.

A consensus family using stake and protocol rules for participation and security. Each deployment must be assessed separately.

A consensus mechanism using computational work to support agreement on transaction history.

A contract arrangement that can delegate execution to another implementation; administration may permit changing that implementation.

A value derived from a private key and used to verify signatures. Publishing it does not normally reveal the private key, but reuse and associated addresses can expose activity patterns.

A gain measured from completed disposals under a stated cost and fee method, distinct from a current paper valuation.

Exchanging a token or claim for its underlying asset under the issuer's or protocol's terms.

A condition where an external call re-enters code before the first execution has completed its state changes. Exploitability depends on reachable paths, call order and whether critical invariants are restored.

Compensation triggered by an introduced user's activity, such as registration, deposits or trading fees.

Reuse of assets received as collateral or custody for another loan, pledge or investment. It creates additional claims on the same economic value and can block withdrawals during stress.

A transaction involving parties with a relevant ownership, management or other relationship. In a custody investigation, the key questions include who authorised it, whose assets funded it and what obligations remained. A relationship warrants scrutiny; it does not alone establish that a particular transfer was unlawful.

Replacement of recent chain history when nodes accept a competing valid branch. Transactions can move, disappear or execute against different prior state.

Rules preventing an already authorised message or transaction from being validly executed again or in another domain. Chain ID, nonce and message-specific state commonly contribute.

The share of lending interest directed to a protocol reserve or treasury rather than suppliers. It changes depositor yield and the resources available to absorb selected losses.

Reuse of stake or delegated economic security for additional services. Rewards come with correlated software, governance and slashing exposure across those services.

Rules and systems that calculate margin, limits, liquidation and other controls. Public descriptions are incomplete if affiliated or privileged accounts receive exemptions.

An interface used by wallets and applications to query or submit information to a blockchain node or service.

A broad informal label for extraction or abandonment. An investigation should identify the specific mechanism and evidence.

A sequence that trades before and after a victim's swap, moving the pool price against the victim and then reversing the attacker's position. Slippage tolerance and order visibility set the available extraction.

A Taproot spending route that reveals a script and proves its inclusion in the output's committed script tree. It is an alternative to the key path. The conditions actually exercised become visible, while unrelated branches can remain undisclosed. The transaction still exposes inputs, outputs and amounts.

Recovery material from which wallet keys can be derived. Sharing it can transfer spending control.

A component responsible for ordering transactions in some scaling systems. Its powers depend on the deployment.

A limited key intended to authorise actions for a period, application or policy without exposing the account's main authority. Its safety depends on the enforced scope, revocation path and any contract upgrades.

A private agreement that modifies economic or governance terms outside the main public document. It can change transfer rights, discounts, liquidity or information access.

A key or account whose approval contributes to authorising a transaction. Displayed signer counts are incomplete unless independence, recovery, delegation and module execution are also known.

A protocol penalty applied to specified validator misconduct. The exact offence, detection and penalty must be read from the live rules; slashing does not cover every outage or exploit.

The difference between an expected and achieved execution price or amount.

An account whose authorisation is enforced by programmable contract logic. Thresholds, guardians, session keys and recovery can be added, while modules and upgrades create additional routes that require review.

A record of data at a specified time. Market values and permissions can change afterward.

The ability of an entity to meet obligations based on the value and availability of assets relative to liabilities. Liquidity timing, encumbrances and legal priority can matter even when gross assets look large.

The price for immediate exchange in a particular market. Different venues and trade sizes can produce different spot prices, and a thin last trade is not sufficient evidence of portfolio liquidation value.

A token designed to track a reference value. Backing, redemption and control differ by design.

A cryptographic commitment to a particular state representation. A proof can establish that a value belongs to the state committed by that root. The root is useful only with the correct chain, block and trust assumptions; an inclusion proof against an arbitrary root does not authenticate the root itself.

Two contract implementations interpret the same storage position for different values. In upgradeable systems, an incompatible layout can overwrite ownership, balances or configuration without an ordinary transfer.

A distorted result caused by observing only the examples that remain visible or meet a success criterion.

A Bitcoin upgrade combining Schnorr signatures with a new output construction and script rules. An output can be spent through its key path or by revealing an applicable script path. Unused script branches need not be disclosed in a script-path spend. Taproot does not make the entire transaction anonymous.

The number or weight of approvals required from a signer set. A 3-of-5 threshold does not prove 5 independent people or devices; common custody can collapse the effective threshold.

A mechanism that delays execution after an action is queued. Its protection depends on the delay, who can cancel or bypass it, and whether users have a practical exit before execution.

A Solana account holding a particular token under an owner authority; it is not necessarily an independent investor.

A Token-2022 extension that invokes a programme during token transfers. Wallets and protocols must account for the extra execution and any accounts or policy it requires.

Total value locked under a stated methodology. It need not equal active trading liquidity or independent capital.

A time-weighted average price calculated from observations across a window. It reduces dependence on 1 instant while adding latency and relying on the liquidity and integrity of the observed market.

A release of restrictions on an allocation. It creates potential availability, not proof of an immediate sale.

A paper gain on assets still held, dependent on valuation and the ability to exit.

The authority able to change a proxy's implementation or configuration. Owner renunciation elsewhere does not remove this power when it is held in a different contract or role.

In ERC-4337, a structured request representing an operation for a smart account. It is submitted through an alternative transaction flow and processed via an EntryPoint contract. The account's validation logic determines authorisation. A readable request still needs review of its calls, account rules and fee arrangements.

An unspent transaction output: a specific output from an earlier Bitcoin transaction that remains available to spend. A new transaction consumes selected outputs in full and creates new outputs. A wallet's displayed balance aggregates the outputs it can spend; it is not a single account balance stored by the network.

A cryptographic proof checked against a specified statement and verification system, commonly used to establish that a rollup state transition follows its rules. It does not, by itself, establish data availability, independent governance, a safe bridge or the accuracy of a website's interpretation of a transaction.

Rules controlling when an allocation becomes available to its recipient.

Trading that creates apparent activity without a genuine change in beneficial ownership.

Data used to satisfy the spending conditions of a Bitcoin transaction, such as signatures. Segregated Witness changes how this data is committed to and counted toward block capacity. Transaction identifiers and witness transaction identifiers cover different serialisations; the distinction matters when tracing dependent transactions.

A representation of another asset whose value depends on the mechanism or party maintaining that relationship.