From mainstream media to the most niche corners of the internet, crypto and the entire language of related terms that have sprung up alongside the investing phenomenon are everywhere.
No matter how much you know or don’t know about cryptocurrencies and the technology that underpins them, this jargon can make a challenging subject even harder to understand.
We’ve put together a glossary of common terms you’re likely to come across to make crypto easier to get your head around, whether you’re looking to invest or not.
A B C D E FG H I J K L M N O P Q R S T V W X Y Z
Altcoin – any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin.
ASIC – Application-Specific Integrated Circuit. An ASIC is a powerful and expensive computing device used for mining cryptocurrency (see ‘mining’).
Bitcoin – the original, largest and best-known cryptocurrency.
Buy the dip – the notion of buying cryptocurrencies when prices have fallen in order to reap the benefits when they rise again.
Blockchain – the underlying technology on which cryptocurrencies operate. A blockchain is essentially a complete ledger of transactions held simultaneously by several people on a computer network. Read more about blockchain here.
Coin – a colloquial term for a cryptocurrency. See also: altcoin, memecoin.
Cold wallet – a physical storage device such as a flash drive, hard drive or solid state drive used to store cryptocurrency offline.
Cryptocurrency – a digital form of currency that can be traded for goods, services or other currencies. Transactions are verified and recorded using cryptography by ordinary people, rather than a centralised authority such as a bank.
Cryptography – a computer science method of keeping information secret and secure by scrambling it into indecipherable information. The information can only be decrypted and read with the necessary key.
Defi – short for decentralised finance. Finance is…
