Glossary
Every entry below links to at least one topic page where the term is explained in depth — this glossary gives you the one- or two-sentence version so you can keep reading without leaving the page you’re on. Acronyms are spelled out on first use.
Access control / admin key — the root-cause class for incidents where a privileged key or role does something it shouldn’t, or was never revoked after its legitimate purpose ended. → /security/incident-timeline/
Alpha Homora — an Ethereum leveraged-yield-farming protocol whose integration with Cream Finance’s Iron Bank was exploited for $37.5M in February 2021. → /lending/money-markets/
Alpenglow — Solana’s proposed consensus replacement targeting roughly 150ms median finality via single-round voting (Votor) and a redesigned block-propagation layer (Rotor); approved by validator vote in September 2025. → /foundations/roadmaps/
AMM (Automated Market Maker) — a smart contract that quotes prices and executes trades algorithmically against pooled reserves instead of matching buy and sell orders on a book. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
am-AMM — an auction-managed AMM design where the winning bidder each period manages the pool’s fees and captures the value of pricing it correctly, instead of leaking that value to outside arbitrageurs. → /exchange/v4-hooks-and-am-amm/
Amplification coefficient () — the parameter in Curve’s StableSwap invariant controlling how flat (constant-sum-like) or curved (constant-product-like) a pool is near balance. → /exchange/stable-pools/
Anchor framework — the dominant Solana smart-contract framework, whose typed Signer and Account wrappers enforce common account-validation checks by default. → /security/bug-classes/
Anoma — a proposed universal intent-machine protocol aiming to be a chain-agnostic interface for signed-intent execution. → /cross-chain/intent-solvers/
APT38 — a North Korea-linked hacking unit (part of the Reconnaissance General Bureau) implicated in some of crypto’s largest thefts. → /security/trusted-hardware-and-threat-models/
Arbitrage — trading to profit from a price discrepancy between two venues; the mechanism that keeps an AMM’s quote near the world price. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Arcium — a confidential-compute network cited as a separate secure-hardware approach alongside TEEs. → /security/trusted-hardware-and-threat-models/
Associated Token Account (ATA) — a Solana account, derived deterministically as a PDA of a wallet and a mint, that holds one wallet’s balance of one token. → /foundations/accounts-and-execution/
Attester — an Ethereum validator’s role in voting for a block during a given slot, distinct from being that slot’s block proposer. → /mev/pbs-and-epbs/
AVS (Actively Validated Service) — a service (such as EigenDA) that an EigenLayer operator opts staked capital into, earning extra yield in exchange for extra slashing exposure. → /staking/restaking/
Bad debt — the shortfall left in a lending pool when a liquidated position’s collateral is worth less than the debt it secured, absorbed or socialized by the protocol. → /lending/liquidations/
BAM (Block Assembly Marketplace) — Jito’s 2025 proposal moving Solana block sequencing into TEE-based nodes with application-defined ordering plugins, launched in a permissioned phase. → /mev/pbs-and-epbs/
Balancer — an Ethereum AMM generalizing the constant-product formula to weighted, multi-asset pools (a constant geometric mean). → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Base fee — the protocol-set, algorithmically adjusted portion of an Ethereum transaction fee (EIP-1559) that is burned rather than paid to any party. → /foundations/fee-markets/
Based rollup — a rollup whose next block is sequenced by the next Ethereum L1 proposer instead of a dedicated sequencer, inheriting L1 liveness at the cost of roughly 12-second latency. → /mev/based-rollups-and-preconfs/
Batch auction — a trade-execution design that collects orders over a window and settles them all at one clearing price per pair, removing the value of being first. → /exchange/batch-auctions/
Beanstalk — an Ethereum stablecoin protocol whose governance was hijacked in April 2022 via a single-transaction flash-loan vote, draining $77M. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Blend — Paradigm/Blur’s oracle-free, peer-to-peer NFT lending protocol that determines rates and liquidation entirely through a live lender auction instead of a price feed. → /oracles/oracle-free-designs/
Blob (EIP-4844) — a large, temporary data package a rollup posts to Ethereum L1 to make its transaction data available, priced by a separate fee market since the Dencun upgrade. → /foundations/fee-markets/
Bonding curve — a formula-priced smart contract that acts as the counterparty for a brand-new token before any real market exists. → /exchange/bonding-curves-and-launches/
Bribe market — a market (Votium, Convex) where vote-escrow token holders are paid to direct their voting power toward a particular outcome, most developed around Curve’s veCRV. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Bridge — infrastructure letting value or a message move from one blockchain to another with no shared validator set, using some trust model (guardian, light client, optimistic, ZK, or burn-mint). → /cross-chain/bridge-designs/
BUIDL — BlackRock’s tokenized money-market fund, the largest institutional real-world-asset product live on both Ethereum and Solana. → /tradfi/tradfi-convergence-and-rwas/
Builder — an entity that assembles a full, ordered block of transactions (often including MEV-extracting bundles) and sells it to a proposer via MEV-Boost. → /foundations/mev-supply-chain/
Bundle — an atomic, ordered group of transactions submitted together to a builder (Ethereum) or Jito’s block engine (Solana), which either all land or none do. → /foundations/mev-supply-chain/
Cashio — a Solana algorithmic stablecoin drained of $28M–$52.8M in March 2022 when its minting logic failed to validate a collateral account’s issuing program. → /stablecoins/pegs-and-psm/
CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol) — Circle’s mechanism for moving native USDC between chains by burning it on the source chain and minting an equal amount on the destination. → /stablecoins/fiat-backed-and-cctp/
CDP (Collateralized Debt Position) — a vault that locks crypto collateral worth more than the debt it mints against it, the mechanism behind DAI, LUSD and crvUSD. → /stablecoins/cdp-stablecoins/
CFMM (Constant-Function Market Maker) — an AMM that accepts any trade leaving a fixed function of its reserves unchanged; Uniswap’s rule is that the reserve product never falls. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Circle Payments Network (CPN) — a payment-network product connecting regulated financial institutions for stablecoin-based settlement. → /stablecoins/payments/
Clober — an EVM on-chain order book using Fenwick-tree and bitmap data structures so every quote, cancel or fill touches a constant or logarithmic number of storage slots. → /exchange/order-books/
CLMM (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker) — an AMM (Uniswap v3, Orca Whirlpools, Raydium CLMM) where liquidity providers back only a chosen price range instead of the full curve. → /exchange/concentrated-liquidity/
CLOB (Central Limit Order Book) — a market structure that stores resting limit orders and matches by price-time priority, as opposed to a curve-priced AMM. → /exchange/order-books/
Close factor — the maximum fraction of a borrower’s debt a single liquidation can repay in one transaction. → /lending/liquidations/
Coincidence of wants — when a batch auction directly matches two orders on opposite sides of a pair, letting them trade against each other without touching outside liquidity. → /exchange/batch-auctions/
Compound — an early and influential Ethereum pooled money market; its Proposal 62 upgrade over-distributed COMP tokens in October 2021. → /lending/money-markets/
Compute unit (CU) — Solana’s metering unit for the computational cost of an instruction; blocks cap total CU per block and per contended account. → /foundations/fee-markets/
Confidential transfer — a Token-2022 extension (Twisted ElGamal encryption plus zero-knowledge proofs) that hides a transfer’s amount while keeping sender and recipient public. → /privacy/privacy-and-compliance/
Contagious Interview — a North Korea-linked social-engineering campaign using fake job interviews to deliver malware to crypto developers. → /security/trusted-hardware-and-threat-models/
CoW Protocol — an Ethereum batch-auction DEX where bonded solvers compete to find the best settlement, matching opposite orders directly before touching an AMM. → /exchange/batch-auctions/
CPI (Cross-Program Invocation) — a Solana program calling another program during the same transaction, Solana’s analogue to an Ethereum contract-to-contract call. → /foundations/accounts-and-execution/
crvUSD — Curve’s CDP-backed stablecoin, whose collateral is liquidated gradually and reversibly via LLAMMA instead of a single discrete auction. → /stablecoins/cdp-stablecoins/
Curve — the Ethereum AMM protocol behind the StableSwap invariant, still systemically important infrastructure for testing stablecoin pegs under stress. → /exchange/stable-pools/
DAICO — a fundraising design (Vitalik Buterin, 2018) gating a project’s spending behind an ongoing token-holder vote instead of releasing all funds upfront. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Dark Forest — Paradigm’s 2020 framing of Ethereum’s public mempool as an environment where any visible, profitable transaction gets copied and front-run by generalized bots. → /mev/mev-taxonomy/
Data availability (DA) — the guarantee that a rollup’s transaction data was actually published so anyone can reconstruct and verify its state, the core problem blobs and PeerDAS solve. → /foundations/roadmaps/
Delta-neutral — a position structured so gains and losses from the underlying asset’s price moves cancel out; the design behind Ethena’s USDe (long spot, short an equal perpetual position). → /stablecoins/delta-neutral/
Dencun — the March 2024 Ethereum upgrade that shipped EIP-4844 blobs, cutting rollup data costs sharply. → /foundations/fee-markets/
Depeg — when a stablecoin or pegged asset trades meaningfully away from its intended reference price, whether from a reserve shortfall, a liquidity shock, or a smart-contract exploit. → /stablecoins/pegs-and-psm/
Discouragement attack — a theoretical staking-economics attack where a validator with a favorable issuance curve profits by flooding the market with stake to push other validators out, then de-staking once yield rises again. → /staking/issuance-and-staking-economics/
Distribution Markets — Dave White’s design extending market-scoring-rule mechanics to continuous-outcome prediction events via a constant-norm AMM over probability distributions. → /exchange/prediction-market-amms/
DLMM (Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker) — Meteora’s concentrated-liquidity design using discrete, constant-sum bins with volatility-based fees instead of continuous ticks. → /exchange/concentrated-liquidity/
DontFront — a Solana convention where a transaction referencing an account prefixed jitodontfront must sit first in any Jito bundle, so it can be backrun but never frontrun. → /mev/order-flow-auctions/
Drift Protocol — a Solana perpetuals exchange combining JIT Dutch auctions, a decentralized limit order book, and an AMM backstop; hacked for $285M in April 2026 via a social-engineered governance migration. → /derivatives/perpetual-futures/
Dutch auction — an auction that starts at a high price and lowers it over time or blocks until a buyer accepts, used in UniswapX intents and Maker-style liquidation designs. → /exchange/rfq-and-intents/
EigenLayer — the largest Ethereum restaking protocol, letting staked or liquid-staked ETH secure additional “actively validated services” in exchange for extra yield and slashing exposure. → /staking/restaking/
EIP-1559 — the Ethereum improvement proposal that replaced first-price gas auctions with a burned, algorithmically adjusted base fee plus a tip; live since the August 2021 London upgrade. → /foundations/fee-markets/
EIP-4844 — the improvement proposal that introduced blob-carrying transactions, shipped in the March 2024 Dencun upgrade. → /foundations/fee-markets/
EIP-7702 / ERC-4337 — Ethereum account-abstraction standards letting a regular wallet temporarily behave like a smart contract, or letting smart-contract wallets sponsor and batch transactions. → /foundations/accounts-and-execution/
Enshrined PBS (ePBS) — the proposal (EIP-7732) to move proposer-builder separation’s builder-commitment and payment logic directly into Ethereum’s consensus protocol, removing the need for a trusted relay. → /mev/pbs-and-epbs/
ERC-20 — Ethereum’s standard interface for fungible tokens, defining balances, transfers and approvals in a contract’s own code. → /foundations/token-standards/
ERC-4626 — a standard interface for yield-bearing vault shares, letting any protocol issue a token representing a deposit that grows over time. → /foundations/token-standards/
ERC-6909 — a multi-token standard letting one contract manage many token types without ERC-1155’s mandatory receiver callbacks. → /foundations/token-standards/
ERC-721 / ERC-1155 — Ethereum’s standards for unique (721) and multi-type or semi-fungible (1155) tokens, most commonly used for NFTs. → /foundations/token-standards/
Ethena — the issuer of USDe, a delta-neutral synthetic dollar combining staked-asset collateral with an equal short perpetual position. → /stablecoins/delta-neutral/
Euler Finance — an Ethereum modular lending protocol hacked for $197M in March 2023 via a donation function with no health check; rebuilt from the ground up as Euler v2. → /lending/modular-lending/
Euler Vault Kit (EVK) / Ethereum Vault Connector (EVC) — Euler v2’s modular architecture, letting independently deployed vaults opt into recognizing each other’s shares as collateral. → /lending/modular-lending/
Everlasting option — an option that never expires, paying ongoing funding (mark minus current payoff) instead of requiring a roll into a new expiry. → /derivatives/power-perps-and-everlasting-options/
“Everything Is A Perp” — Paradigm’s 2024 framework unifying stablecoins, margined futures, and AMM LP positions as power perpetuals of different exponents. → /derivatives/perpetual-futures/
Execution ticket — a proposed Ethereum mechanism selling the right to propose a future block as a lottery ticket instead of an ongoing per-block auction. → /mev/mev-burn-tickets-focil-timing/
Exponent — an emerging Solana yield-tokenization protocol, the closest analogue to Pendle on Solana. → /derivatives/yield-tokenization/
Fee-on-transfer token — a token that deducts a fee or burns a portion on every transfer, which can desynchronize a naive AMM pool’s internal accounting from its real reserves. → /foundations/token-standards/
Fee switch — a governance-activated mechanism redirecting a portion of protocol trading fees from liquidity providers to the protocol treasury or token holders; Uniswap activated one in December 2025. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Firedancer — Jump Crypto’s independent, from-scratch Solana validator client, addressing single-client risk; its full client launched on mainnet in December 2025. → /foundations/roadmaps/
Flash accounting — Uniswap v4’s settlement model, where all balance changes across a transaction net out at the end via transient storage instead of transferring tokens after every step. → /exchange/v4-hooks-and-am-amm/
Flash loan — an uncollateralized loan that must be borrowed and repaid, with a fee, inside the same transaction, or the entire transaction reverts as if it never happened. → /lending/flash-loans/
Flashbots — the organization that turned Ethereum’s chaotic public-mempool MEV bidding war into a private, sealed-bid builder auction, later formalized as MEV-Boost. → /mev/mev-taxonomy/
Floor perpetual — a proposed NFT-specific perpetual letting holders hedge floor-price risk against a locked NFT without selling it. → /derivatives/power-perps-and-everlasting-options/
FOCIL (Fork-choice enforced Inclusion Lists, EIP-7805) — a proposed Ethereum mechanism forcing block builders to include transactions a separate committee has already seen waiting. → /mev/mev-burn-tickets-focil-timing/
Fraxswap — the first live TWAMM, built on a Uniswap v2 fork by Frax Finance. → /exchange/twamm/
Front-end/infrastructure compromise — the root-cause class where the website, API, or signing pipeline a user trusts is compromised, independent of the underlying contract code; the largest realized-loss category in this site’s incident database. → /security/incident-timeline/
Funding rate — the periodic payment between the long and short sides of a perpetual future, sized to keep the contract’s price tracking the underlying spot price. → /derivatives/perpetual-futures/
Fusaka — the December 2025 Ethereum upgrade shipping PeerDAS and a roughly 60M gas limit. → /foundations/roadmaps/
Gauntlet — a risk-parameterization firm advising DeFi protocols on setting collateral and liquidation parameters. → /lending/risk-engines/
GDA / VRGDA (Gradual / Variable Rate Dutch Auction) — a Paradigm-designed pricing mechanism that raises or lowers an issuance price relative to how far ahead of or behind a target schedule sales are running. → /exchange/bonding-curves-and-launches/
GENIUS Act — the July 2025 U.S. federal law establishing the first comprehensive framework for regulated “payment stablecoins.” → /stablecoins/payments/
GMX — a decentralized perpetuals exchange (Arbitrum, Avalanche) where liquidity providers act as the counterparty to all trader positions via a shared oracle-priced pool. → /derivatives/perpetual-futures/
GOO (Gradual Ownership Optimization) — a Paradigm mechanism-design post cited as a source on this site’s governance page; no page here confirms what shipped from it. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Governance attack — the root-cause class where voting power is acquired, borrowed, or concentrated to pass a malicious or contested proposal. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Governance minimization — Fred Ehrsam’s 2020 argument that protocols should formally vote on as little as possible, locking important rules into immutable code instead. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Guardian network — Wormhole’s external validator-set trust model, where a set of independent guardians sign off on cross-chain messages. → /cross-chain/bridge-designs/
Harberger lease — a mechanism where an asset’s holder self-assesses its value (and pays tax on it) while being obligated to sell at that price to anyone willing to pay it; referenced in am-AMM manager-auction designs. → /exchange/v4-hooks-and-am-amm/
Harvest Finance — an Ethereum yield-aggregator hacked for $24M in October 2020 by round-tripping a flash loan through a Curve pool to move its share price. → /exchange/amm-oracles/
Health factor — a single number compressing collateral value, liquidation threshold, and debt into one ratio; a borrower is safe above 1 and liquidatable below it. → /lending/collateral-ltv-health/
Hegic — one of the first pooled, oracle-free options protocols on Ethereum (2020), settling purely by moving already-locked collateral. → /derivatives/options/
Hook (Uniswap v4) — a contract attached to a pool that runs custom logic before or after swaps, liquidity changes, or donations, turning the AMM into a programmable platform. → /exchange/v4-hooks-and-am-amm/
Hyperliquid — a standalone L1 (HyperBFT consensus) running a fully on-chain central limit order book for perpetuals and spot, used as the benchmark venue both Ethereum and Solana perp DEXs are measured against. → /derivatives/perpetual-futures/
Impermanent loss (IL) — the shortfall of an LP position’s value versus simply holding the same tokens, caused by the pool selling the appreciating asset and buying the depreciating one as prices move. → /exchange/impermanent-loss-vs-lvr/
Inclusion list — a list of transactions a separate committee attests were available, which a block proposer or builder must include (see FOCIL). → /mev/mev-burn-tickets-focil-timing/
Insurance fund — a pool of protocol-owned capital used to absorb bad debt when a liquidation fails to fully cover a position’s losses. → /lending/liquidations/
Intent — a signed message stating a desired outcome rather than the exact transaction to achieve it, leaving execution to a competitive market of solvers or fillers. → /exchange/rfq-and-intents/
Iron Finance (TITAN) — a partially-collateralized stablecoin protocol whose June 2021 collapse (TVL fell from over $2B to near zero) previewed the same reflexive death spiral that hit Terra a year later. → /stablecoins/algorithmic-failures/
Isolated margin — an account structure where collateral and risk are walled off per position or per market, as opposed to cross-margin’s shared pool of collateral. → /lending/collateral-ltv-health/
Isolation mode — a lending-market safety feature restricting a risky or new collateral asset to a fixed USD debt ceiling and a single loan asset, walling off contagion to the rest of the pool. → /lending/collateral-ltv-health/
JIT (Just-In-Time) auction — a per-order Dutch auction (Drift) run immediately before a trade hits the order book or AMM, letting makers compete to fill it at a better price. → /exchange/order-books/
JIT liquidity — a strategy where a provider adds a large concentrated-liquidity position for the instant a big trade executes, captures a disproportionate fee share, and withdraws immediately after. → /exchange/lp-toxicity-and-jit/
Jito — the company and protocol running Solana’s dominant out-of-protocol MEV auction (the block engine), plus a liquid staking token and a restaking product. → /foundations/mev-supply-chain/
Jito bundle — an atomic group of up to five transactions submitted to Jito’s block engine, guaranteed to land together in order, or not at all, in exchange for a tip. → /foundations/mev-supply-chain/
Jito Tip Router — the mechanism distributing Jito’s MEV tips to JitoSOL vault depositors; itself a flagship example of a Solana restaking service (an NCN). → /staking/restaking/
JitoSOL — Jito’s liquid staking token, a receipt for staked SOL that also captures a share of MEV tips via the Tip Router. → /staking/liquid-staking-tokens/
JLP (Jupiter Perps LP token) — the liquidity-provider token for Jupiter’s oracle-priced perpetuals pool, whose holders act as counterparty to all trader positions. → /derivatives/perpetual-futures/
Jupiter — Solana’s dominant DEX aggregator and perpetuals venue, routing the large majority of the chain’s swap and aggregator volume. → /exchange/routing-and-aggregation/
JupiterZ — Jupiter’s default-on RFQ system, where off-chain market makers quote firm prices for swaps instead of routing through on-chain pools. → /exchange/rfq-and-intents/
Kamino — a Solana lending, leverage, and liquidity protocol offering isolated “Create Market” lending markets and curator vaults. → /lending/modular-lending/
KelpDAO — an Ethereum LRT protocol whose cross-chain messaging to Unichain was forged in April 2026 for $290M via a single compromised message-verifier. → /security/incident-timeline/
Keeper — an automated bot that executes profitable protocol actions (liquidations, oracle updates, arbitrage) in exchange for a fee or bounty. → /lending/liquidations/
Kinked interest-rate curve — a lending-rate formula that climbs slowly with utilization up to a target point, then climbs sharply beyond it, pushing borrowers to repay and lenders to deposit when a pool runs dry. → /lending/interest-rate-models/
KyberSwap Elastic — a concentrated-liquidity AMM drained of over $48M across six chains in November 2023 via a rounding error smaller than 0.00000000001% in tick-liquidity accounting. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Lazarus Group — the umbrella name for North Korea’s state-sponsored hacking operations, implicated across many of this site’s largest incidents. → /security/trusted-hardware-and-threat-models/
Leader schedule — Solana’s epoch-ahead, stake-weighted assignment of which validator produces each slot’s block, known publicly in advance. → /foundations/mev-supply-chain/
Leaderless auction — Paradigm’s design removing a block leader’s “free option” to bid last, using threshold-encrypted bids gossiped among a committee; live in Angstrom’s top-of-block auction. → /mev/mev-burn-tickets-focil-timing/
Light client — a bridge or verification design that reads and checks another chain’s block headers directly rather than trusting an external committee. → /cross-chain/bridge-designs/
Liquidation — the process of forcibly closing an under-collateralized position, where a third party repays debt and seizes discounted collateral as an incentive to act fast. → /lending/liquidations/
Liquidation threshold — the collateral ratio at which a position becomes eligible for liquidation, always set higher (safer) than the loan-to-value ratio used for new borrows. → /lending/collateral-ltv-health/
Liquidity Hub — Aave V4’s shared-pool architecture, where every isolated borrower-facing “Spoke” draws from one common liquidity source. → /lending/modular-lending/
LLAMMA — Curve’s continuous, reversible “soft liquidation” AMM, which gradually converts crvUSD collateral as price falls instead of a single discrete auction. → /stablecoins/cdp-stablecoins/
LMSR (Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule) — Robin Hanson’s classic prediction-market maker design, with a bounded worst-case subsidizer loss but uneven losses across an outcome’s life. → /exchange/prediction-market-amms/
Local fee market — Solana’s per-account congestion pricing, where a busy account’s priority fee rises without raising the price for unrelated, uncontended transactions. → /foundations/fee-markets/
Loopscale — a Solana lending protocol exploited for $5.8M in April 2025 when its risk engine trusted a spoofed cross-program invocation for a collateral price. → /lending/risk-engines/
Loss-versus-rebalancing (LVR) — the rigorous replacement for impermanent loss: an LP’s shortfall versus a trader holding the same inventory but trading at real market prices, equal to exactly what arbitrageurs extract. → /exchange/impermanent-loss-vs-lvr/
LP token — a receipt token representing a liquidity provider’s share of a pool, often itself usable as collateral or tradeable elsewhere. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
LST (Liquid Staking Token) — a receipt token (stETH, JitoSOL, mSOL) representing a staked position, tradeable and usable in DeFi while the underlying stake keeps earning rewards. → /staking/liquid-staking-tokens/
LRT (Liquid Restaking Token) — a tokenized restaked position, compounding ordinary staking risk with the slashing risk of every service the underlying capital is opted into. → /staking/lrt-risks/
LTV (Loan-to-Value) — the maximum fraction of posted collateral’s value a borrower may newly borrow against. → /lending/collateral-ltv-health/
Mango Markets — a Solana perpetuals and lending platform where an attacker manipulated his own perp position’s price to borrow $100M–$117.8M against inflated “collateral” in October 2022. → /oracles/oracle-manipulation/
MakerDAO / Sky — the Ethereum protocol behind DAI (now largely rebranded USDS), the pioneering CDP-backed stablecoin. → /stablecoins/cdp-stablecoins/
McAMM / MinMEV — Uniswap v4 hook designs that auction a pool’s first trade each block, or elicit block-end prices from builders, to reclaim LVR for liquidity providers. → /exchange/v4-hooks-and-am-amm/
MetaDAO — a live Solana futarchy protocol, where PASS/FAIL conditional-token markets decide and automatically execute governance proposals. → /derivatives/prediction-markets/
Metis — Jupiter’s multi-hop, multi-split routing engine for finding the best price across Solana’s DEXs. → /exchange/routing-and-aggregation/
MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) — the profit that whoever controls transaction ordering in a block can capture by inserting, reordering, or censoring transactions. → /mev/mev-taxonomy/
MEV-Boost — the out-of-protocol software that lets Ethereum validators auction their block-proposing right to specialized builders via a trusted relay. → /mev/pbs-and-epbs/
MEV burn — a proposed Ethereum design to burn most of a block-builder auction’s proceeds rather than paying them to the block’s proposer. → /mev/mev-burn-tickets-focil-timing/
MEV-Share — Flashbots’ order-flow auction that lets searchers bid to backrun a user’s hidden transaction, refunding most of the winning bid to the user. → /mev/order-flow-auctions/
MEV supply chain — the pipeline of roles (searcher, builder, relay, proposer on Ethereum; leader and Jito on Solana) that turns transaction-ordering power into realized profit. → /foundations/mev-supply-chain/
MEV tax — an application-level mechanism (“Priority Is All You Need”) charging a fee proportional to the priority-fee-revealed MEV of a transaction, on chains with competitive priority ordering. → /mev/order-flow-auctions/
Modular lending — an architecture (Morpho Blue, Euler v2) that unbundles a lending pool into a minimal, isolated market primitive plus a separate curation layer. → /lending/modular-lending/
Morpho Blue / Midnight — Morpho’s isolated, permissionless lending-market primitive (Blue) and its fixed-rate-discovery extension (Midnight, 2026). → /lending/modular-lending/
Multiverse Finance — Paradigm’s design turning conditional prediction-market outcomes into fully composable parallel financial systems. → /derivatives/prediction-markets/
Native rollup — a rollup design that verifies its own EVM state transitions using an L1 EXECUTE precompile, instead of a fraud or validity proof system. → /mev/based-rollups-and-preconfs/
NCN (Node Consensus Network) — Jito Restaking’s unit of service on Solana, the analogue of an Ethereum AVS. → /staking/restaking/
Nirvana Finance — a Solana stablecoin protocol drained of $3.5M in July 2022 via a flash loan that pumped its own bonding-curve token price. → /security/incident-timeline/
No-arbitrage band — the price range, set by a CFMM’s fee, within which an arbitrageur cannot profitably trade against the pool. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Nomad — an Ethereum optimistic bridge hacked for $190M in August 2022 when a trusted root initialized to zero let anyone copy a valid cross-chain message. → /cross-chain/bridge-hacks/
OFA (Order Flow Auction) — a system that removes a user’s transaction from the public mempool, lets searchers bid for the right to trade around it, and refunds most of the winning bid to the user. → /mev/order-flow-auctions/
On-chain order book — a CLOB implemented entirely in smart-contract or program state, engineered (Phoenix, OpenBook, Clober) to keep every quote, cancel, and fill affordable. → /exchange/order-books/
OpenBook — a Solana on-chain order book deployed as a multisig-controlled successor after Serum’s upgrade key was found to belong to FTX. → /exchange/order-books/
Opportunity market — Paradigm’s proposal letting a sponsor privately crowdsource scouting for an opportunity without leaking its interest to competitors. → /derivatives/prediction-markets/
Optimistic bridge — a bridge design that assumes messages are valid by default unless challenged within a dispute window. → /cross-chain/bridge-designs/
Opyn — an Ethereum options protocol whose Squeeth product was the first live power perpetual (2022-2024). → /derivatives/options/
Oracle — a mechanism that gets an external or aggregated price on-chain, via a push feed, a pull feed, or an on-chain TWAP/median. → /oracles/push-vs-pull-vs-twap/
Oracle-free design — a protocol (Blend, replicating-payoff CFMMs) that avoids needing any external price feed at all. → /oracles/oracle-free-designs/
Oracle/price manipulation — the root-cause class where a manipulated, stale, or misread price feed drives an incorrect lending, liquidation, or settlement decision. → /oracles/oracle-manipulation/
Orbital — Paradigm’s 2025 proposal generalizing Uniswap v3-style concentrated liquidity to pools of thousands of stablecoins, using nested spherical ticks. → /exchange/stable-pools/
Orca (Whirlpools) — a Solana concentrated-liquidity AMM, ported from the Uniswap v3 tick model. → /exchange/concentrated-liquidity/
Paradigm — the crypto-focused research and investment firm behind the largest single share of mechanism-design essays cited across this site. → /synthesis/paradigm-ideas-shipped/
PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) — the split between who assembles a block’s contents (the builder) and who has the right to propose it (the validator), letting ordinary validators earn MEV without running trading infrastructure. → /mev/pbs-and-epbs/
PDA (Program Derived Address) — a Solana account address deterministically derived from seeds and a program ID, with no private key, giving a program exclusive signing authority over it. → /foundations/accounts-and-execution/
PeerDAS — Ethereum’s data-availability-sampling scheme, letting nodes verify a blob was published without downloading all of it; shipped in the Fusaka upgrade. → /foundations/roadmaps/
Pendle — an Ethereum yield-tokenization protocol splitting a yield-bearing deposit into a Principal Token (fixed redemption) and a Yield Token (floating yield claim). → /derivatives/yield-tokenization/
Penpie — a yield-boosting protocol built on Pendle, drained of $27M in September 2024 via a reentrancy bug combined with Pendle’s permissionless market creation. → /derivatives/yield-tokenization/
Permit2 — Uniswap’s token-approval standard, letting a user sign a single off-chain approval that many protocols (including UniswapX) can then use for gasless transfers. → /exchange/rfq-and-intents/
Perpetual future (“perp”) — a derivative with no expiry date, pinned to spot price via a periodic funding payment between the long and short sides instead of physical delivery. → /derivatives/perpetual-futures/
Phoenix — a Solana on-chain central limit order book (Ellipsis Labs), crankless and settled atomically. → /exchange/order-books/
pm-AMM — Paradigm’s AMM invariant designed to lose value to arbitrage at a constant, predictable rate regardless of current probability, built for prediction-market outcome tokens. → /exchange/prediction-market-amms/
Points / airdrops — token-distribution mechanisms rewarding past usage or loyalty, an alternative or complement to direct governance rights. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Power perpetual — a perpetual future targeting index instead of a strike-based payoff, giving pure convex exposure with no strike and no expiry; the case (“squeeth”) was the first to launch live. → /derivatives/power-perps-and-everlasting-options/
Preconfirmation — a slashable promise from an opted-in Ethereum L1 proposer about a rollup transaction’s inclusion, issued roughly 100ms ahead of the block. → /mev/based-rollups-and-preconfs/
Price impact — the deterministic cost of a trade’s size relative to a pool’s depth, distinct from slippage. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Priority fee — the optional, additional per-compute-unit payment on Solana that lets a transaction outbid others for inclusion or ordering priority, paid entirely to the leader since SIMD-0096. → /foundations/fee-markets/
Priority gas auction (PGA) — a bidding war among searchers or proposers who compete purely on transaction fee to win a race, rather than through a structured auction. → /mev/based-rollups-and-preconfs/
Proprietary AMM — a Solana market-making program (SolFi, HumidiFi, Lifinity, Tessera) whose operator actively re-centers its own curve via cheap, frequent oracle updates instead of relying on passive arbitrage. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Protocol-owned liquidity — liquidity a protocol itself owns and deploys, rather than renting it from external liquidity providers. → /exchange/twamm/
PSM (Peg Stability Module) — a contract that swaps a stablecoin 1:1 against a reference asset, putting redemption arbitrage on-chain and making it instant and permissionless. → /stablecoins/pegs-and-psm/
Pull oracle — an oracle design (Pyth) where prices are continuously aggregated off-chain but written on-chain only when a consumer fetches and pays for the latest update. → /oracles/push-vs-pull-vs-twap/
Pump.fun — Solana’s dominant permissionless memecoin launchpad, running a constant-product virtual-reserve bonding curve that “graduates” a token to a real AMM pool once 85 SOL is raised. → /exchange/bonding-curves-and-launches/
Push oracle — an oracle design (Chainlink) where a decentralized off-chain network writes a price on-chain whenever it moves enough or enough time passes. → /oracles/push-vs-pull-vs-twap/
Pyth — Solana’s dominant pull oracle, where an off-chain network continuously aggregates prices with a confidence interval. → /oracles/push-vs-pull-vs-twap/
Quantum markets — Paradigm’s design letting unlimited competing prediction-market proposals share one pool of trading capital via shared tradable credit. → /derivatives/prediction-markets/
Rainbow staking — a proposed Ethereum staking-tier design letting validators choose different risk/reward profiles rather than one uniform issuance rate. → /staking/issuance-and-staking-economics/
Raydium — a leading Solana AMM (AMM v4/CPMM and CLMM), also a major venue for Jupiter-routed volume. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Reentrancy — a bug class where an external call re-enters a function before its own state updates finish, letting the same funds be claimed more than once; the bug behind The DAO hack. → /security/bug-classes/
Rekt.news — a continuously updated, community-maintained leaderboard of the largest crypto hacks and exploits, a primary source for this site’s incident database. → /security/incident-timeline/
Relay — a trusted intermediary (Ethereum) that escrows a block between a builder and a proposer, checking payment and validity before the proposer signs blind. → /mev/pbs-and-epbs/
Reorg (reorganization) — when the canonical chain switches to a different, competing sequence of recent blocks, discarding transactions that were briefly confirmed. → /mev/pbs-and-epbs/
Replicating market makers — a body of research (Angeris, Evans, Chitra) proving certain LP payoffs, including options-like ones, can be built directly into a CFMM’s trading function with no oracle needed. → /oracles/oracle-free-designs/
Restaking — letting already-staked capital secure a second service (an AVS on Ethereum, an NCN on Solana) in exchange for extra yield and extra slashing exposure. → /staking/restaking/
RFQ (Request For Quote) — a trading model where market makers send firm prices directly to a user, who signs against the best quote instead of trading against a public pool. → /exchange/rfq-and-intents/
Risk engine — the code path that runs on every borrow, withdrawal, or liquidation to decide, deterministically and in real time, whether a position is within acceptable bounds. → /lending/risk-engines/
Ronin — the Ethereum-linked sidechain behind Axie Infinity, whose bridge was drained of $624M–$625M in March 2022 via a never-revoked signer whitelist. → /cross-chain/bridge-hacks/
Rollup — a chain that executes transactions off Ethereum’s L1 but posts data and proofs back to it for security, the core of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap. → /foundations/roadmaps/
Rotor — Solana’s proposed successor to its Turbine data-propagation protocol, using erasure-coded shreds. → /foundations/roadmaps/
Sandwich attack — an MEV strategy where a bot buys immediately before and sells immediately after a victim’s trade, profiting from the price impact the victim’s own trade causes. → /mev/mev-taxonomy/
SEAL 911 — a rapid-response security coordination network used to trace funds and coordinate exchange freezes after major incidents. → /security/trusted-hardware-and-threat-models/
Sealevel — Solana’s parallel transaction-execution runtime, which runs non-conflicting transactions simultaneously because each declares its accounts up front. → /foundations/accounts-and-execution/
Sequencer — the entity (usually a single operator) that orders and batches transactions for a rollup before posting them to L1. → /mev/based-rollups-and-preconfs/
Shutter — a threshold-encrypted mempool live on Gnosis Chain since July 2024, hiding transaction contents until a committee releases the decryption key after inclusion. → /mev/encrypted-mempools/
SIMD (Solana Improvement Document) — Solana’s governance process for protocol changes, activated by validator stake-weighted feature-gate votes rather than a tokenholder DAO. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Slashing — a protocol-level penalty (loss of staked funds) for a validator or restaking operator’s provable misbehavior. → /staking/restaking/
Slippage — the gap between a trade’s expected quote and its actual fill price, caused by other transactions landing first, distinct from price impact. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
Smart contract / account-validation logic bug (Solana) — the root-cause class for a missing or incomplete check of an account’s signer, owner, type, or issuing program; Solana’s dominant bug family. → /security/bug-classes/
Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) — the Foundation-run program that removed 30+ validators in 2024-2025 for operating private, sandwich-enabling mempools. → /staking/issuance-and-staking-economics/
Solana Pay — a QR-code and URL-based payment standard for point-of-sale stablecoin transfers on Solana. → /stablecoins/payments/
Solend — a Solana money market whose June 2022 “whale” liquidation crisis forced governance to choose between disorderly liquidation and an emergency account takeover. → /lending/liquidations/
Solver — a specialized party that competes to find or fulfill the best execution for a batch auction order or a cross-chain intent. → /exchange/batch-auctions/
Spot price — an AMM’s instantaneous, reserve-ratio-implied price, trivially manipulable within a single transaction unless smoothed by a TWAP or median. → /exchange/amm-oracles/
Squeeth — Opyn’s live implementation of a power perpetual, tracking ETH squared exposure. → /derivatives/power-perps-and-everlasting-options/
Stake-weighted quality of service (QoS) — Solana’s practice of prioritizing transaction forwarding for validators with more staked SOL. → /foundations/mev-supply-chain/
StableSwap — Curve’s invariant blending a constant-sum and constant-product term via an amplification coefficient, giving far lower slippage than a plain CFMM for pegged assets. → /exchange/stable-pools/
Sysvar — a special Solana account type exposing cluster-wide data (like recent block hashes); a spoofed sysvar account was the root cause of the Wormhole hack. → /foundations/accounts-and-execution/
Symbiotic — a generalized, any-ERC-20-collateral restaking protocol backed by Paradigm, positioned as complementary to EigenLayer’s ETH-centric design. → /staking/restaking/
Tempo — a payments-first EVM layer-1 built by Stripe and Paradigm, with stablecoin-denominated fees and no native volatile gas token; mainnet launched March 2026. → /stablecoins/payments/
TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) — secure hardware that runs a program on data it never sees in the clear, producing a cryptographic attestation of correct execution; the basis of BuilderNet, Unichain’s builder, and Jito’s BAM. → /security/trusted-hardware-and-threat-models/
Terra / UST / LUNA — an algorithmic stablecoin (UST) and its companion token (LUNA) that collapsed from a combined value in the tens of billions to near zero in eight days in May 2022. → /stablecoins/algorithmic-failures/
Threshold encryption — a cryptographic scheme where a committee jointly holds key shares and only releases the decryption key once enough members agree, used by Shutter and proposed relay-removal designs. → /mev/encrypted-mempools/
Tick — the discrete price boundary unit in a concentrated-liquidity AMM, defining the edges of a liquidity provider’s chosen range. → /exchange/concentrated-liquidity/
Timing game — a proposer’s rational strategy of delaying block publication within its slot to capture more late-arriving MEV bids, at the cost of network stability. → /mev/mev-burn-tickets-focil-timing/
Tip — the payment attached to a Jito bundle (Solana) or a builder payment (Ethereum) that compensates the block producer for prioritizing a transaction or bundle. → /mev/solana-mev/
Token-2022 (Token Extensions) — Solana’s newer token program letting issuers switch on optional behaviors (transfer fees, transfer hooks, confidential balances, permanent delegate) without deploying custom code. → /foundations/token-standards/
Tornado Cash — an Ethereum privacy mixer sanctioned by OFAC in August 2022 and delisted in March 2025 after a court ruled its immutable code isn’t sanctionable “property,” though a co-founder was still convicted on one charge. → /privacy/privacy-and-compliance/
TraderTraitor — a North Korea-linked hacking unit’s operational name for crypto-industry-targeted campaigns, attributed to several of this site’s largest incidents. → /security/trusted-hardware-and-threat-models/
Transfer hook — a Token-2022 extension letting a mint run custom program logic (deny-lists, fee logic) on every transfer via a cross-program invocation. → /foundations/token-standards/
TVL (Total Value Locked) — the aggregate dollar value of assets deposited in a protocol, a common (if imperfect) sizing metric across DeFi. → /exchange/cfmm-math/
TWAMM (Time-Weighted Average Market Maker) — Paradigm’s design letting a trader submit a long-term order that an embedded pool executes as infinitely many infinitesimal virtual trades, filling near the time-weighted average price. → /exchange/twamm/
TWAP (Time-Weighted Average Price) — a price smoothed over a time window rather than read instantaneously, making single-block manipulation far more expensive. → /exchange/amm-oracles/
UMA — the optimistic-oracle protocol Polymarket uses for dispute resolution, where a bonded proposer’s answer stands unless challenged and a token-weighted vote overrules it. → /derivatives/prediction-markets/
Unichain — a single-sequencer OP Stack L2 whose block builder runs inside a TEE and streams 200ms “flashblocks,” live since August 2025. → /mev/based-rollups-and-preconfs/
Uniswap v3 — the Ethereum AMM that introduced concentrated liquidity, letting LPs back only a chosen price range. → /exchange/concentrated-liquidity/
Uniswap v4 — the Ethereum AMM version that added hooks, a singleton pool contract, and flash accounting, turning the AMM into a programmable platform. → /exchange/v4-hooks-and-am-amm/
UniswapX — Uniswap’s live Ethereum intent system, using Dutch auctions seeded by an off-chain RFQ start price and settled via Permit2. → /exchange/rfq-and-intents/
USDC — Circle’s fiat-backed stablecoin, the largest by DeFi integration on Ethereum and by supply share on Solana. → /stablecoins/fiat-backed-and-cctp/
USDe — Ethena’s delta-neutral synthetic dollar, backed by staked-asset collateral hedged with an equal short perpetual position. → /stablecoins/delta-neutral/
USDS / DAI — Sky’s (formerly MakerDAO’s) CDP-backed stablecoin, minted against locked crypto collateral since 2017. → /stablecoins/cdp-stablecoins/
USDT — Tether’s fiat-backed stablecoin, one of the two largest stablecoins by market capitalization alongside USDC. → /stablecoins/fiat-backed-and-cctp/
Utilization — the fraction of a lending pool’s deposits currently borrowed, the input that drives a kinked interest-rate curve. → /lending/interest-rate-models/
UXD Protocol — Solana’s own attempt at a fully on-chain delta-neutral stablecoin, which shut down in August 2024 for lack of product-market fit rather than a peg failure. → /stablecoins/delta-neutral/
vAMM (Virtual AMM) — a constant-product curve used purely for price discovery on a perpetual future, with no real reserves backing it, as opposed to an oracle-priced pool. → /derivatives/perpetual-futures/
Validator — a network participant that stakes ETH (Ethereum) or SOL (Solana) to propose and attest to blocks under proof-of-stake. → /staking/issuance-and-staking-economics/
Vault (ERC-4626) — a standardized yield-bearing deposit contract issuing shares that appreciate as the underlying strategy earns returns. → /foundations/token-standards/
Vote-escrow (ve) — a governance design (Curve’s veCRV) where locking a governance token for a fixed period grants voting power and reward boosts proportional to the lock length. → /governance/governance-and-tokenomics/
Wormhole — a cross-chain guardian-network bridge whose Solana-side program was exploited for $326M in February 2022 via a deprecated signature-verification function. → /cross-chain/bridge-hacks/
Wrapped token — a representation of an asset locked on one chain, minted on a destination chain, as opposed to native burn-and-mint issuance. → /cross-chain/bridge-designs/
Yield Protocol — the 2020 Ethereum design originating market-discovered fixed rates via tradable, maturity-dated yTokens, the ancestor of Morpho Midnight. → /lending/interest-rate-models/
Yield tokenization — splitting a yield-bearing deposit into a Principal Token (fixed redemption) and a Yield Token (floating yield claim), creating a market for fixed rates. → /derivatives/yield-tokenization/
yToken — Yield Protocol’s tradable, maturity-dated token whose market price discovers a fixed interest rate the same way a bond market does. → /lending/interest-rate-models/
Zero-knowledge (ZK) proof — a cryptographic method letting someone prove they know a value without revealing it; provably unable to hide a CFMM’s own reserves, since those must stay public for trading to work. → /exchange/zk-dex-limits/
ZK light client — a bridge design verifying a succinct zero-knowledge proof of another chain’s state instead of trusting a committee or replaying headers directly. → /cross-chain/bridge-designs/