Practical control over the keys or other mechanisms that authorize movement of assets.
Custody answers a useful question: who can actually approve a transfer? On an exchange, the operator commonly controls the relevant keys. With self-custody, control rests with you or your chosen account arrangement. The name on an account and the party holding technical control can differ.
IN THE WILD
"My exchange account says I have BTC. The exchange, rather than my wallet, controls the keys for withdrawals."
A decentralized autonomous organization: a group coordinating decisions and resources through defined rules, often using blockchain contracts.
A DAO gives a community a way to organize proposals, votes and shared resources. The name does not tell you how widely control is distributed. Token concentration, delegation, administrators and legal arrangements can all affect who actually makes decisions and who can carry them out.
IN THE WILD
Community chat: "The treasury proposal is up. We're voting on funding the next development milestone."
A decentralized application with important backend logic or state running on a decentralized network.
A dapp can use smart contracts to handle actions that another website would process on its own servers. The surrounding interface, data endpoints or administrators may still be centralized. It helps to separate those components when asking what keeps working if one service disappears or changes its rules.
IN THE WILD
Your browser interface calls an exchange's onchain contract after you authorize the transaction in your wallet.
The ability to obtain the data needed to verify or reconstruct a blockchain system's state.
A commitment tells you which data a system refers to, but does not make that data downloadable. Users or nodes still need a route to obtain it. Data availability concerns that access when needed; preserving the same data indefinitely as an archive is a related but different job.
IN THE WILD
Your rollup node downloads the published batch data and reconstructs balances instead of taking the operator's word for the state.
An exchange whose trading execution or settlement relies on blockchain protocols.
A DEX lets trades settle through onchain mechanisms such as liquidity pools or order books. That changes how custody and execution work, but the website you use may still be operated by a team or hosted centrally. Check the actual protocol and transaction rather than treating the word decentralized as a complete description.
IN THE WILD
A DEX website helps you prepare a swap, and your wallet shows the contract transaction that will settle it onchain.
DeFi covers activities such as swapping, lending and supplying liquidity through onchain systems. You can often inspect transactions and interact without a traditional brokerage account, but each app has its own dependencies. Contract code, administrators, price oracles and the assets involved all shape what you're trusting when you click a familiar-looking financial button.
IN THE WILD
You connect a wallet to a lending app, then check its collateral rules and contract permissions before making a deposit.
An EVM call that runs another contract’s code using the calling contract’s storage and context.
Delegatecall is powerful because it separates where code lives from where data lives. Proxy contracts use it to run implementation logic while keeping the proxy's storage. That also makes mistakes dangerous: code written for the wrong storage layout can change unintended values, so the called implementation needs careful review.
IN THE WILD
A proxy delegates a withdrawal to its implementation, and that code reads the balance stored at the proxy address.
A significant move away from an asset's intended reference price, such as a stablecoin's dollar target.
When someone says a stablecoin has depegged, the market is no longer pricing it close to its target. Reserve doubts, redemption problems or thin liquidity can all contribute. The token may recover its peg, but a familiar ticker does not make recovery automatic.
IN THE WILD
"My 'dollar' token is trading at $0.92. The name hasn't changed; the peg has."
A sequence of indexes that identifies a key within a hierarchical wallet's key tree.
Think of the path as the route from shared seed material to a particular account or address key. Wallets can use different routes, including hardened steps with different derivation properties. Restoring with the wrong path may show no balance even though assets remain at the original addresses.
IN THE WILD
"The recovery words match, but this app is checking a different account path."
Cryptographic evidence that a message was authorized by the key corresponding to a verifying public key.
A signature supports the message's integrity and shows authorization by the relevant key. It does not identify a person, hide the message or explain whether signing was a good decision. Systems also need rules specifying when and where the authorization represented by that signature can be used.
IN THE WILD
"Here's the signed transfer." The node verifies authorization by the required key before accepting the transaction.
The daily pick rotates automatically. Our initial collection was published on October 9, 2026. New words join on their publication date. Every concept includes a reference.