Concentrating liquidity can make a position more useful for trades within its selected range, but it makes range choice important. When the market moves outside the range, the position generally stops earning trading fees until it becomes active again and can be held in one asset. The funds haven't vanished; their composition and activity changed.
IN THE WILD
“Why did my LP stop earning fees?” The market price moved outside your selected range, leaving the position inactive.
Inclusion of a transaction in a block, with later blocks adding confidence that it will remain accepted.
On Bitcoin, the block containing your payment gives it one confirmation. Every subsequent block adds another and more work on top of that history. This is why a recipient may wait before treating a payment as settled. Confirmations increase confidence; they don't turn settlement into an absolute guarantee.
IN THE WILD
'It has three confirmations now.' The payment's block is followed by two more blocks on the accepted Bitcoin chain.
Agreement about which valid blockchain history and state the network accepts.
Consensus is how participants converge on the same history when competing updates are possible. The mechanism includes ways to select a chain and incentives or penalties for participants. It isn't simply a popularity vote on every payment: nodes still reject data that violates their validation rules.
IN THE WILD
Two nodes receive competing valid blocks, then follow the protocol's chain-selection rules to converge on the same history.
These are the checks that keep the ledger consistent: who can spend, what a valid block contains and how much new value may be created. Full nodes enforce them locally. A powerful miner or validator cannot make a rule-breaking block valid just by announcing it loudly.
IN THE WILD
A miner proposes a Bitcoinblock that claims too much newly issued BTC. Nodes following the rules reject it.
An AMM model that relates two asset reserves through the formula x × y = k.
In the basic model, removing some of one asset requires adding enough of the other to satisfy the pool's rule. That makes each further unit more expensive as the reserve shrinks. The simple equation explains the shape of trading, while fees and real protocol accounting mean k need not remain permanently unchanged.
IN THE WILD
A swap buys tokens from a constant-product pool, reducing that reserve and increasing the other; the next buyer faces a different price.
An Ethereum account associated with deployed code that runs when it is called.
A contract account can hold ETH, keep data and follow programmed rules when a transaction or another contract calls it. It doesn't simply wake up on its own because a deadline passed. What happens to its assets depends on its code and any permissions that code gives administrators or other participants.
IN THE WILD
A lending contract updates your debt when you interact with it, using its code and stored data to decide the result.
The onchain creation of a contract account with executable code.
Deployment puts a particular instance of a program on a particular chain. It consumes network resources and produces a contract address people can interact with. The same project's test-network deployment and production deployment are different instances, so checking the network and address matters even when their source code looks identical.
IN THE WILD
The team shares its mainnet contract address after testing an earlier deployment; users check that address rather than reusing the testnet one.
A change to a contract system’s behavior through a mechanism designed to allow it.
Deployed code isn't usually edited like a page on a website. An upgrade may switch a proxy's implementation or move users to a new contract. That can fix bugs and add features, but the upgrade process is part of the trust model: its permissions, delays and oversight affect what users are relying on.
IN THE WILD
A governance proposal schedules a new implementation, giving users time to read the changes before the proxy begins using it.
The process of matching published source code and compiler settings to a deployed contract’s bytecode.
Verification helps you see the code behind a contract address instead of only its bytecode. Explorers can display readable functions and let others reproduce the compilation match. A verified badge is a transparency signal, not a security certificate: the matched code may still contain bugs, risky permissions or intentionally harmful behavior.
IN THE WILD
Before interacting, you check the verified source and discover that an administrator can change a fee, which the app’s homepage never mentioned.
A deterministic digest designed to make reversing it or finding certain matching inputs computationally impractical.
A hash turns data into a compact identifier or commitment. The same input and algorithm give the same result, while changing the input generally changes its digest. Hashing differs from encryption: there is no general decryption key that restores the original data from the digest.
IN THE WILD
Your node hashes the received transaction data and checks whether the result matches the transaction identifier it was given.
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.