Glossary

130 terms behind the figures Coinmico shows. Each one links to the page where you can see it live.

A

Address: A public identifier derived from a key pair that can receive coins or tokens on a blockchain.
Airdrop: A free distribution of tokens to wallet addresses, usually to reward early users or attract attention.
All-time high (ATH): The highest price an asset has ever traded at on the reference index.
All-time low (ATL): The lowest price an asset has ever traded at on the reference index.
Altcoin: Any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin.
Altcoin season: A period in which most altcoins outperform bitcoin; on Coinmico, measured as the share of the top 100 that beat bitcoin over 90 days.
Arbitrage: Buying an asset where it is cheaper and selling where it is dearer to capture the difference.
Ask: The lowest price a seller is currently willing to accept in an order book.
Auto-deleveraging (ADL): A last-resort mechanism in which an exchange forcibly reduces profitable positions to cover losses its insurance fund cannot.
Automated market maker (AMM): A decentralised-exchange design in which a formula over a pool's reserves sets the price instead of an order book.

B

Base currency: The asset being priced in a trading pair — the first symbol, as BTC in BTC/USDT.
Bear market: A prolonged period of falling prices and negative sentiment.
Bid: The highest price a buyer is currently willing to pay in an order book.
Bitcoin dominance: Bitcoin's market cap as a share of total crypto market cap.
Block: A batch of transactions added to a blockchain as a unit, linked to the previous block.
Blockchain: A shared ledger of transactions maintained by many independent computers that agree on its contents.
Breadth: The share of assets rising over a period — how broad a move is, as opposed to how large.
Bridge: A protocol that moves an asset's value from one blockchain to another, usually by locking it on the source chain and minting a representation on the destination.
Bull market: A prolonged period of rising prices and positive sentiment.

C

Candle: A chart element showing an asset's open, high, low and close prices over one interval.
Centralised exchange (CEX): A company that holds customer funds and matches their orders on an order book it operates.
Circulating supply: The number of units of an asset currently available to trade, excluding locked, vesting, burned or reserved units.
Cold wallet: A wallet whose private key is kept on a device never connected to the internet.
Concentrated liquidity: An AMM design in which liquidity providers choose a price range for their capital rather than spreading it over all prices.
Confirmation: Each block added after the one containing a transaction, making it progressively harder to reverse.
Consensus: The rules by which a blockchain's nodes agree on which transactions are valid and in what order.
Constant product: The AMM rule x × y = k: a pool's two reserves must always multiply to the same constant, so the price is their ratio.
Custody: Who holds the private keys — and therefore the coins — on your behalf.

D

Decentralised exchange (DEX): A smart contract that lets users trade tokens directly from their wallets, without a company holding funds or matching orders.
Depth: The quantity of resting orders near the current price — how much can be traded before the price moves materially.
Derivatives: Contracts whose value derives from an underlying asset's price — in crypto, mainly perpetual futures and options.
Diamond hands: Slang for holding through severe drawdowns without selling.
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA): Buying a fixed dollar amount of an asset at regular intervals regardless of price.
Drawdown: The decline from a peak to a subsequent low, expressed as a percentage.

E

Exchange token: A token issued by an exchange, typically granting fee discounts and sometimes a share of revenue.

F

Fear & Greed index: A 0–100 sentiment score; on Coinmico, computed entirely from measured market data across six components.
Finality: The point after which a transaction cannot be reversed by the network.
Fully diluted valuation (FDV): Price multiplied by maximum (or total) supply — the market cap if every unit that will ever exist were circulating.
Funding rate: The periodic payment between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract that keeps its price near spot.

G

Gas: The fee paid to a blockchain's validators to process a transaction, denominated in the chain's native coin.
Genesis block: The first block of a blockchain, hard-coded into its software.

H

Halving: The scheduled 50% reduction in bitcoin's block reward, occurring roughly every four years.
Hardware wallet: A physical device that stores private keys in a secure chip and signs transactions without the key leaving it.
Heatmap: A treemap of the market with each asset's tile sized by market cap and coloured by price change.
HODL: Slang for holding an asset long-term rather than trading it, from a 2013 forum misspelling of "hold".
Honeypot: A malicious token contract that lets buyers buy but prevents them from selling.
Hot wallet: A wallet whose private key is held on an internet-connected device such as a phone or browser.

I

Impermanent loss: The shortfall a liquidity provider suffers versus simply holding, because the pool sells the token that rises and buys the one that falls.
Index price: A composite price for an asset built from several markets, used as a reference for pricing and for marking derivatives.
Insurance fund: A reserve an exchange maintains to cover losses when a liquidation fills below the position's bankruptcy price.

L

Layer 1: A base blockchain that settles its own transactions — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain.
Layer 2: A network that processes transactions off a layer-1 chain and settles the results back to it, inheriting its security at lower cost.
Leverage: Position size divided by the margin backing it; the multiplier applied to both gains and losses.
Limit order: An order to buy or sell at a specified price or better, which waits in the order book until it can be filled.
Liquidation: The forced closure of a leveraged position by the exchange when its margin falls to the maintenance level.
Liquidation cascade: A chain reaction in which each forced liquidation moves the price into the next cluster of liquidation levels.
Liquidity: How easily an asset can be bought or sold in size without moving its price.
Liquidity pool: A smart-contract reserve of two tokens against which traders swap, with the price set by the ratio of the reserves.
Liquidity provider (LP): A user who deposits tokens into a liquidity pool and earns a share of its trading fees.
Long: A position that profits if the price rises.

M

Maintenance margin: The minimum margin a leveraged position must retain before the exchange liquidates it.
Maker: A trader whose resting order provides liquidity to the order book and is filled by someone else.
Margin: The collateral posted to open and maintain a leveraged position.
Mark price: A smoothed reference price, built from a spot index plus the perpetual's average premium, used to value positions and trigger liquidations.
Market cap: Price multiplied by circulating supply — the market's valuation of every circulating unit at the latest price.
Market order: An order to buy or sell immediately at the best available prices in the order book.
Matching engine: The exchange software that pairs incoming orders against the order book by price and time priority.
Max supply: The largest number of units of an asset that will ever exist, if the protocol defines one.
Maximal extractable value (MEV): Profit that block producers or bots extract by choosing the order of transactions in a block.
Memecoin: A token whose value rests on attention and community rather than any product or cash flow.
Momentum: The tendency of a recent price trend to continue; measured on Coinmico as bitcoin's distance from its 30-day average.

N

Native coin: The asset built into a blockchain itself, used to pay its transaction fees.
New listing: An asset that has recently begun trading on a venue Coinmico measures.
Nonce: A per-account counter that orders an address's transactions and prevents replaying them.

O

OHLCV: Open, high, low, close and volume — the five figures that describe one interval on a price chart.
On-chain: Recorded on a blockchain and therefore publicly verifiable — as opposed to happening inside an exchange's internal ledger.
Open interest (OI): The total notional value of derivatives positions currently open on a venue.
Oracle: A service that delivers off-chain data, such as a price, to smart contracts.
Order book: The list of resting buy (bid) and sell (ask) orders on an exchange, sorted by price.

P

Paper wallet: A private key or seed phrase printed or written on paper as an offline backup.
Perpetual futures: A futures contract with no expiry, kept near the spot price by periodic funding payments between longs and shorts.
Phishing: Impersonating a trusted site or party to capture credentials or induce a harmful signature.
Price impact: The worsening of a trade's average price caused by the trade itself moving the pool or book.
Price index: A composite price built from many markets, weighted and filtered so that no single venue or thin market sets it.
Private key: The secret number that authorises spending from an address; whoever holds it controls the coins.
Proof of stake: A consensus mechanism in which validators post the chain's coin as collateral to propose blocks and lose it for dishonesty.
Proof of work: A consensus mechanism in which miners compete to solve a computational puzzle for the right to add the next block.
Public key: The number derived from a private key that lets others verify signatures made with it; addresses are derived from it.

Q

Quote currency: The asset a trading pair is priced in — the second symbol, as USDT in BTC/USDT.

R

Real-world asset (RWA): A token representing an off-chain asset such as a stock, bond, commodity or fund share.
Reported volume: The trading volume a venue states about itself, as opposed to volume measured from its trade feed by a third party.
Rotation: Capital moving from one part of the market to another — between sectors, or between bitcoin and altcoins.
Rug pull: A scam in which a token's creators withdraw the liquidity pool or dump their holdings, leaving buyers with an unsellable asset.

S

Sandwich attack: An MEV strategy that places a buy before a victim's swap and a sell after it, capturing the slack in the victim's slippage tolerance.
Sector: A grouping of assets by function or theme — layer 1s, DeFi, stablecoins, memecoins, and so on.
Seed phrase: A list of 12 or 24 words encoding the master key from which a wallet derives every private key and address.
Self-custody: Holding your own private keys rather than leaving coins with an exchange or custodian.
Short: A position that profits if the price falls.
Short squeeze: A sharp rise driven by short positions being forced to buy back, either voluntarily or through liquidation.
SIM swap: An attack in which a mobile carrier is persuaded to move a victim's phone number to the attacker's SIM, capturing SMS codes and resets.
Slippage: The difference between the price quoted for a trade and the price at which it executes.
Slippage tolerance: The worst price a DEX user will accept for a swap; the transaction reverts if execution would be worse.
Smart contract: Code deployed on a blockchain that holds assets and executes fixed rules when called.
Spot: Trading the asset itself for immediate settlement, as opposed to a derivative on its price.
Spread: The gap between the best bid and the best ask in an order book.
Stablecoin: A token designed to hold a fixed value, usually one US dollar, backed by reserves or a mechanism.
Stablecoin dominance: Stablecoins' share of total crypto market cap — a gauge of how much capital is sitting in cash within the market.
Staking: Locking a proof-of-stake chain's coin to help validate the network in exchange for a share of issuance and fees.
Swap: A single on-chain transaction exchanging one token for another through a DEX pool.

T

Taker: A trader whose order fills immediately against resting orders, consuming liquidity from the book.
Timeframe: The interval each candle on a chart represents, from one minute to one week.
Token: An asset issued by a smart contract on a blockchain, as opposed to the chain's native coin.
Token approval: Permission granted to a contract to move a specified amount of a token from your wallet without further prompts.
Token standard: A shared interface that tokens on a chain implement so wallets and exchanges can handle them uniformly — ERC-20 on Ethereum, SPL on Solana.
Total supply: All units of an asset that currently exist, including locked and vesting units, minus any burned.
Total value locked (TVL): The dollar value of assets deposited in a protocol or pool.
Trading pair: Two assets quoted against each other on a venue, such as BTC/USDT or ETH/BTC.
Turnover: Trading volume relative to a base — Coinmico's Fear & Greed index compares current volume to the past week, signed by the direction of the move.
Two-factor authentication (2FA): A second login credential beyond the password — a code from an app, a hardware key, or (weakest) an SMS.

U

Unlock: The scheduled release of previously locked tokens — to investors, team or treasury — into circulating supply.

V

Vesting: A schedule under which allocated tokens become transferable gradually over months or years.
Volatility: The size of an asset's price swings over a period, usually expressed as an annualised standard deviation of returns.
Volume: The dollar value of an asset traded over a period, usually 24 hours.

W

Wallet: Software or hardware that holds private keys and signs transactions; the keys, not the coins, live in it.
Wallet drainer: A malicious script, sold as a kit, that induces victims to sign approvals or messages that let the attacker empty their wallets.
Wash trading: Trading with oneself to create the appearance of volume.
Whale: An address or entity holding or trading an amount large enough to move a market.
Wick: The thin line above or below a candle's body marking the interval's high or low beyond the open and close.
Wrapped asset: A token on one chain representing an asset from another, held in custody or a bridge contract — WBTC on Ethereum represents bitcoin.

Y

Yield: Return earned on crypto assets through staking, lending or providing liquidity, usually quoted as an annual percentage.