Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Dictionary

Terms commonly used in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency

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DeFi

'Decentralized Finance' or 'DeFi' - generally refers to the digital assets and financial smart contracts, protocols, and decentralized applications (DApps) built on Ethereum blockchain.

Other Important Terms

Cryptocurrency wallet – A medium of accessing and controlling user’s cryptocurrency. Contrary to a common misconception, cryptocurrency wallet does not store any cryptocurrency; it just grants user access to a certain amount of cryptocurrency associated with the wallet. A wallet stores user’s private keys. There are two types of cryptocurrency wallets: physical and virtual.

Short Position

Short position – a state the trader is in when he is selling cryptocurrency asset to buy it later. For example, if a trader sold Bitcoin in November 2017 and bought it again in January 2018, he was in short position between these two trades.

Mining

Mining – a process during which transactions are verified and added to the P2P network. It is conducted by the miners, which have to solve a cryptographic problem. In order to do it, miners have to produce the hash equal or less than the target hash; they try to do it again and again, inputting the combination of the block header and nonce into a hash algorithm, until the solution is found.

DAG

DAG – short for Directed Acyclic Graph. The alternative to blockchain where each next transaction is being confirmed by the previous transaction(s). Has better scalability than the blockchain. There are several DAG-based cryptocurrencies right now. For example, Nano is a DAG-based cryptocurrency.

Hash Rate

Hash rate – also known as hash power, is a value that represents a number of times a hash function can be computed per second by a miner or the whole network. This value depends on 2 factors: The actual computing power of a miner; The network a miner works in. Difficulty of hash function can be different in different networks. For example, the hash rate of Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, one of the most popular GPUs for mining, in Ethereum network is approximately 24 MHash/s. It means that this GPU is able to run hash algorithm approximately 24 million times per second.

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