Glossary

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Glossary
This page explains common terms and lingo used in the crypto space and in this documentation.
Annual Percentage Yield (APY)
The rate of return earned on an investment, taking into account the effect of compounding interest. Compounding with respect to Yield Farming means, that your rewards will increase when you reinvest your received rewards.
You will only receive the shown APY if you always reinvest. The APY does not take transaction fees into account. You need to decide when to reinvest.
Arbitrage
In its simplest form, an arbitrage opportunity is when two exchanges offer different prices for the same token. One can then buy them on the exchange with the cheaper price and sell them on the exchange with the higher price. The difference in this exchange are the gains. Arbitrage is also a market mechanism which ensures that prices across exchanges stay the same since performing the arbitrage will change the liquidity pool ratios in a way that after the arbitrage both exchanges have a similar price.
Obviously the DeFi space is already overflown with arbitrage bots so competing in this market is hard. To effectively make gains via arbitrage, one usually makes use of flash loans.
See also Liquidity Pool and Flash Loan to learn more.
ATH / ATL
The all time high (ATH) and all time low (ATL) is referring to the time points where a token had the highest or lowest recorded price.
Automated Market Maker (AMM)
Please read the section Automated Market Maker (AMM).
Backing
Guarantee, that an asset can be exchanged with a fixed amount of another asset(s).
See also Pegging, which is a similar concept.
Bridge
Please read the linked page to understand what a bridge is:
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Bridge
Burn
Existing tokens which no one has any access to (and never will) are considered to be burned. Burning tokens is often done by sending tokens to an address which can not be accessed. For example, on BSC 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD is such an address.
There are several reasons to burn tokens:
1.Demand and supply define a tokens price. Burning tokens reduces the supply and given existing demand will increase the price.
2.Liquidity providers get LP tokens as collateral for withdrawal of their share of the liquidity pool. Burning these LP tokens means that no one can withdraw the respective liquidity and therefore increases the security for users. See also Rug Pulling.
Circulating Supply
Circulating supply refers to the number of tokens that are already in the hands of the public and does not include tokens that are locked up or being held in reserve.
Circulating supply should not be confused with Total Supply and Max Supply.
See also Minting, Burn and Vesting to learn more.
Deflationary Token
Token with decreasing circulating supply.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
Please read the linked page to understand what a DAO is:
🗳
TOADao
Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA)
Common term in crypto, referring to an investment strategy. Instead of trying to predict when/if the market is up or down and buying accordingly, the DCA strategy suggest to simply split your investment into smaller investments which you perform over time independent of the current market conditions. By doing so, you will most likely not get the best price but you will get an average price. With the volatility of crypto this can be a good strategy to reduce regret of having missed the ATL or having bought at an ATH. If someone suggests you to DCA down, they mean that you should frequently buy smaller portions while the price of a token is on a downwards trend instead of gambling on hitting the lowest point.
Dripping
A continous release of small portions of a fixed sum. This usually refers to some reward pool which is distributed continously in small portions.
DYOR
Do your own research — a common term in crypto, prompting others to form their own view on a crypto project.
Farming
Please read the linked page to understand what farming is:
🌾
Yield Farming
Faucet
Please read the linked page to understand what a Faucet is:
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Faucet
Flash Loan
A loan in the DeFi ecosystem is a financial mechanism that allows a user to take a lend of an specific token by providing another one as a collateral. These have been implemented in several ways on different ecosystems, allowing the investors to put their investment into work without actually changing it.
A Flash Loan is a new type of loan that does not require the user to provide a collateral to cover the loan. This uncollateralized loan that a user takes has a different constraint, it has to be returned to the lender before the full transaction ends. Lending and returning is done in a single transaction.
Flash Loan Attack
A flash loan attack is not a single thing but can be a combination of multiple actions to exploit a system. While a flash loan attack can also be an attack against the flash loan provider itself, it usually just uses the capital of the flash loan to perform the attack on some other DeFi contract. One example could be a token price manipulation through messing with the liquidity pool to create arbitrage opportunities on other exchanges or protocols.
Index
Measures the combined value of a basket of assets.
Index Backing
Guarantee, that an asset can be exchanged with a fixed amount of other assets.
Inflationary Token
Token with increasing circulating supply without max supply.
KYC
Know Your Customer — process of customer identity verification. This is a common process in finance and also in the crypto space to prevent illegal activities or to avoid liability for customer's activities.
Liquidity Pool
Please read the linked page to understand what a liquidity pool is:
🌊
Liquidity Pools
Locking
When tokens are locked in some contract, meaning that the token owner wallet has not access to these tokens until they are unlocked.
See also Vesting to learn more.
Market Cap
Market cap is a way to measure the total market value of a token, and often used as an indicator of relative dominance and popularity.
Market Cap=Current Price×Circulating Supply\text{Market Cap} = \text{Current Price} \times \text{Circulating Supply}Market Cap=Current Price×Circulating Supply
The market cap does not in any way reflect how much money was invested. A project can have a high market cap while there is close to zero actual investment in the project.
Though this metric is widely used, more information before making trading decisions is recommended.
See also Circulating Supply to learn more.
Max Supply
Max supply refers to the maximum number of tokens that will ever be created. This means that once the maximum supply is reached, there won’t be any new coins mined, minted or produced in any other way.
Max supply should not be confused with Total Supply and Circulating Supply.
See also Minting, Burn and Vesting to learn more.
Minting
Increasing the total supply of a token by releasing new tokens. If a token has a max supply, then the number of tokens which can be minted is limited by the max supply. If there is no max supply, the token can be minted infinitely and is therefore considered to be an inflationary token.
See also Total Supply, Max Supply, Inflationary Token​
Multisig
A multisig is generally a wallet which requires multiple signatures for transactions to be executed. They increase the security by requiring multiple persons to confirm.
Order Book
An order book records the interest of buyers and sellers. They respectively can announce for what price they are willig to trade a certain amount. If the interest between buyers and sellers matches, the order book facilitates a trade. The middle between bids (buyer) and asks (seller) defines the price of the asset.
Pegging
The price of one asset being bound to the price of another asset(s).
Stable coins like BUSD are one example of pegging. Since BUSD is pegged by USD, you expect 1 BUSD will always have the same value as 1 USD.
See also Backing, which is a similar concept.
Price Impact
In an Automated Market Maker (AMM), swapping assets changes the ratio in a liquidity pool which results in a change in the exchange rate. This recalculation of the exchange rate is done for every unit of the underlying assets. Price impact is when your effective exchange rate is increased by your own trade.
Reflections
When a share of every transaction of a token is distributed to all other holders of this token, this is called reflection.
Rug Pulling
If someone takes away important support of a project, this is known as rug pulling. This can make a token worthless due to a severe price reduction or by removing the ability to sell.
There are many forms of rug pulling, e.g.:
1.Removing large portions of a liquidity pool, which removes the ability to sell.
2.Selling high percentages of the circulating token supply in a short period, which drastically reduces the token price.
Slippage
If a trade can only be executed with worse conditions than the trader expected, we are talking about slippage. In a classical Order Book this can happen when another buyer is quicker in accepting a sell offer, leaving only worse sell offers to fulfill the trade. In an Automated Market Maker (AMM) this can happen when parallel swaps shift the ratio of tokens in the Liquidity Pool, thereby changing the current exchange rate.
Slippage can be especially strong during events which result in one sided trades (mostly buys or sells) like a launch event or bad news. Setting a slippage during your trade means that your trade can be x% worse than for what you initiated it.
Be very careful with this parameter! You can lose a lot of your funds.
When trading fails, people are quick to suggest setting a high slippage. In most cases this is bad advise! There are many reasons why a trade can fail. One common example can be rounding issues which you can solve by setting a more even amount for the target asset like 3500000 instead of 3539838.
Staking
If you put your tokens into a pool (e.g. a farm), then you effectively own a share of that pool. In other words, you have a stake in the pool. The process of you supplying your tokens to the pool is therefore called staking.
See also Farming.
Timelock
A timelock refers to how smart contract changes are enacted. For example, there can be a 48h period until contract changes take effect. This gives users the option to opt-out before an upcoming change if they disagree with the change.
This should not be confused with Locking / Vesting.
Tokenomics
Tokenomics is a wordplay on token and economics. It usually refers to different properties and mechanics of a token. Properties can things like a max supply. Mechanics can be things like sell, buy or transaction taxes, reflections or minter functionalities.
Total Supply
Total supply refers to the number of tokens that currently exist and are either in circulation or locked somehow. It is the sum of tokens that were already mined/minted minus the total of tokens that were burned or destroyed.
Total supply should not be confused with Circulating Supply and Max Supply.
See also Minting, Burn and Vesting to learn more.
Total Value Locked (TVL)
Is used to measure the overall health of a DeFi market. Tokens supplied as liquidity in Liquidity Pools can be removed at any time. Staking in yield farms gives an incentive to leave the tokens in the liquidity pool. This can be done by providing rewards and also by incurring yield farm exit fees. This is referred to as "locking" the liquidity. The total value locked (TVL) on a yield farm is the total value staked in this yield farm.
See also Farming and Liquidity Pool to learn more.
Vesting
If tokens are locked in a contract until a predefined date or another condition is met, these tokens are vested. This is often done on token launches to prevent large sell offs of initial investors.
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Outline
Annual Percentage Yield (APY)
Arbitrage
ATH / ATL
Automated Market Maker (AMM)
Backing
Bridge
Burn
Circulating Supply
Deflationary Token
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA)
Dripping
DYOR
Farming
Faucet
Flash Loan
Flash Loan Attack
Index
Index Backing
Inflationary Token
KYC
Liquidity Pool
Locking
Market Cap
Max Supply
Minting
Multisig
Order Book
Pegging
Price Impact
Reflections
Rug Pulling
Slippage
Staking
Timelock
Tokenomics
Total Supply
Total Value Locked (TVL)
Vesting