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Address poisoning is a scam where an attacker sends a tiny transaction from a lookalike address, hoping the victim later copies it by mistake from their history.

A bridge is a protocol that moves assets or value between different blockchains, and it's one of the most frequently exploited attack surfaces in crypto.

Custodial services hold users' private keys on their behalf, while non-custodial services let funds move directly between users' own wallets.

Dollar-cost averaging is an investing approach that buys a fixed amount of an asset on a regular schedule, regardless of price.

A depeg is when a stablecoin's market price moves away from the value it's designed to track, usually one dollar.

The Fear & Greed Index is a sentiment gauge that scores crypto market mood on a scale from 0 (extreme fear) to 100 (extreme greed).

Fixed-rate swaps lock in the quoted exchange rate for a limited window, while floating-rate swaps track the live market rate until the deposit is processed.

A gas fee is the payment required to have a blockchain network process a transaction, separate from any fee or spread charged by an exchange.

A halving is a scheduled event, roughly every four years for Bitcoin, that cuts the reward paid to miners for producing new blocks in half.

A hard fork is a blockchain rule change that isn't backward-compatible and can split the chain in two, while a soft fork tightens the rules in a way older nodes can still follow.

A hot wallet stays connected to the internet for everyday use, while a cold wallet keeps its private keys offline for stronger security.

Impermanent loss is the value gap between providing liquidity to an AMM pool and simply holding the same assets, caused by price divergence between them.

KYC (Know Your Customer) is identity verification a platform collects from users; AML (Anti-Money Laundering) is the broader set of rules and monitoring built to stop illicit funds moving through the financial system.

A Layer 2 is a scaling network built on top of a base blockchain, like Ethereum, to process transactions faster and more cheaply while inheriting the base chain's security.

Liquidation is the forced closure of a leveraged or collateralized crypto position when its collateral value falls below a required maintenance threshold.

Maker and taker fees are the two-tiered pricing model order-book exchanges use: a lower fee for orders that add liquidity, a higher one for orders that remove it.

Market cap dominance measures the share of total crypto market capitalization held by a single asset, most commonly tracked for Bitcoin.

A memo or destination tag is an extra numeric or text field some networks require alongside a deposit address to route funds to the correct recipient.

The mempool is the pool of valid transactions each node holds while they wait to be included in a block, ranked by the fee rate they pay.

A multi-signature (multisig) wallet requires more than one private key to approve a transaction, so no single key can move funds alone.

A network confirmation is a block added on top of the one containing your transaction, and most networks require several before treating a deposit as final.

An order book is the live list of open buy and sell orders an exchange matches against each other to set price and execute trades.

A private key is the secret piece of data that proves ownership of a crypto address and authorizes it to send funds.

A public key is the cryptographic counterpart to a private key, and a wallet address is the shorter, shareable string derived from it that others send funds to.

Replace-by-Fee (RBF) lets the sender swap an unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction for a new version paying a higher fee, so it confirms sooner.

A seed phrase is a sequence of words that can regenerate a crypto wallet's private keys, and it should never be shared with anyone.

Slippage is the difference between the exchange rate you're quoted and the rate you actually receive when a swap executes.

The spread is the gap between the buy and sell rates an exchange partner quotes for a given asset pair.

A stablecoin is a crypto asset designed to hold a steady value, typically pegged one-to-one to a reference currency like the US dollar.

A whale is a wallet or entity holding a large enough amount of a crypto asset that its trades can noticeably move the market.