The crypto glossary A–Z
The words from the charts, the wallet pop-ups and the group chat. Get the meaning, see an example and follow the source.
Degen
A crypto risk-taker who dives into speculative trades, often with more enthusiasm than research.
Delegatecall
An EVM call that runs another contract’s code using the calling contract’s storage and context.
Depeg
A significant move away from an asset's intended reference price, such as a stablecoin's dollar target.
Derivation path
A sequence of indexes that identifies a key within a hierarchical wallet's key tree.
Diamond hands
Holding through big price swings and pressure to sell, described in crypto chat as having an unshakable grip.
Digital signature
Cryptographic evidence that a message was authorized by the key corresponding to a verifying public key.
Double spending
An attempt to spend the same digital funds in two conflicting payments.
DYOR
Do your own research: check the claims yourself instead of taking a stranger's hype as the whole story.
ECDSA
Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm: a public-key method for creating and verifying digital signatures.
Ed25519
An EdDSA digital signature scheme using the Edwards25519 curve and its specified hashing and encoding rules.
EIP
An Ethereum Improvement Proposal: a document describing a proposed technical change or standard.
EIP-1559
The Ethereum upgrade that introduced a dynamic execution base fee and revised transaction fee settings.
Encryption
Transforming readable data into a form that requires appropriate key material to recover.
Entropy
A measure of uncertainty that helps describe how unpredictable a cryptographic secret is.
Epoch
A group of slots used to organize consensus timing and related duties.
ERC-1155
An Ethereum standard that lets one contract manage multiple token types and transfer them in batches.
ERC-20
An Ethereum interface standard for fungible tokens, including balances, transfers and spending allowances.
ERC-4626
An Ethereum standard for tokenized vaults that manage an ERC-20 asset and issue vault shares.
ERC-721
An Ethereum token standard for individually identified non-fungible tokens.
Ether
Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency, usually written as ETH, used for transaction fees and staking.
Ethereum
A blockchain that runs programmable accounts and applications, with ether as its native asset.
Event log
Data emitted during contract execution that applications can read from transaction records.
EVM
The Ethereum Virtual Machine, which executes Ethereum contract bytecode according to shared rules.
Execution payload
The part of an Ethereum consensus block that carries execution-layer block data and transactions.
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Concept entries explain ideas. Our separate asset registry identifies coins, tokens and networks by source metadata. Sources & standards