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.
GM
Good morning: the quick hello you see all over crypto and Web3 chats, whatever the time zone.
GN
Good night: a casual sign-off when someone leaves a crypto chat or calls it a day.
Governance token
A token used in a protocol or organization's decision-making system.
Gwei
A unit equal to one billion wei, commonly used to quote Ethereum gas prices.
Halving
Bitcoin’s scheduled halving of the block subsidy every 210,000 blocks.
Hard fork
A rule change that can make blocks valid under the new rules but invalid under the old ones.
Hardware wallet
A dedicated device designed to generate, protect and use signing keys without exposing them to a general-purpose computer.
Hashrate
The number of hash calculations performed per second by mining equipment or a mining network.
HD wallet
A hierarchical deterministic wallet that derives a tree of keys from shared seed material.
Health factor
A collateralized position’s safety metric; in Aave, liquidation-adjusted collateral value divided by debt value.
HODL
Holding onto your crypto instead of selling when the market gets noisy.
Hopium
Hope with the volume turned up: crypto slang for optimism running ahead of the evidence.
Hot wallet
A wallet whose signing capability is available on an internet-connected system.
HTLC
A hashed time-locked contract: a conditional payment combining a secret-hash requirement with a timeout.
Impermanent loss
A liquidity position’s value shortfall compared with holding the deposited assets, caused by changing relative prices.
IPFS
InterPlanetary File System: a protocol suite for addressing and sharing content through content-derived identifiers.
JSON-RPC
A JSON-based request and response format commonly used by applications to communicate with blockchain nodes.
Keccak-256
A Keccak hash function with a 256-bit output, used extensively in Ethereum.
Key derivation function
An algorithm that derives cryptographic key material from input secrets and contextual data.
Layer 1
A blockchain's base network, responsible for its own consensus and canonical state.
Layer 2
A system that processes activity outside a base blockchain while relying on it for key security or settlement functions.
Leverage
Exposure to a position larger than the capital directly supporting it.
Light client
A client that checks selected blockchain information using compact proofs and protocol-specific assumptions.
Lightning Network
A Bitcoin payment network that uses channels so every payment does not need its own onchain record.
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Concept entries explain ideas. Our separate asset registry identifies coins, tokens and networks by source metadata. Sources & standards