DeFi Glossary

AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.

Audit

An audit is either an internal or independent comprehensive review of a concept, system, process, company, or product. A comprehensive audit includes a thoughtful and in-depth look at the structure, strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities of the thing or process being audited.

Audits may be either informal or formal audits and are meant to be a tool to find and analyze weaknesses, so that issues and problems discovered during an audit may be remediated, mitigated, or corrected.

APY

Annual Percentage Yield, a time-based measurement of the Return On Investment (ROI) on an asset. For example, $100 invested at 2% APY would yield $102 after one year, if there is no compounding of any interest earned on that $100 through the year. Assuming a static APY rate, the Monthly ROI would be 0.16%, in this case.

Arbitrage

The trading of a coin or crypto derivative, where the price spread between two different markets or exchanges for the same asset or product is utilized to earn greater profits.

In DeFi, automated yield farming uses algorithmic arbitrage strategies to maximize returns for investors. These arbitrage strategies may include buying, selling, lending, and/or providing liquidity of one or more digital assets, often in the same day.

Arbitrum

Arbitrum is a next-generation layer-2 for Ethereum. Arbitrum’s goal is to be the default layer-2 rollup for Ethereum users and developers. Arbitrum One is the name of the public mainnet for Arbitrum.

Arbitrum is built by Offchain Labs, a world-class team of researchers, engineers, and Ethereum enthusiasts.

ArbitrumOne

Arbitrum One is the name of the public mainnet for Arbitrum.

Automated Market Maker

An Automated Market Maker (AMM) is a decentralized asset trading pool that enables market participants to buy or sell cryptocurrencies. AMMs are non-custodial and permissionless in nature. Most AMMs utilize either a constant product, constant mean, or constant sum market-making formula; however, the most common is a constant product market maker, most notably Uniswap.

Bear Market

A period marked by prevailing negative investor sentiment about an asset or class of assets. A bear market can last weeks, months, or years.

Beta Code

Later stage prototype computer code, programs, and algorithms meant to solve a problem, and/or provide digital goods or services. Beta code comes with the expectation that the code has more functionality and stability as a mid-to-late stage prototype stage with a Beta testing phase, and that the software functionality, features, and security may still be limited.

The codebase, process, system, and/or network is often opened up to a limited number of testers who stress test systems and provide feedback for improvements to the developer or development team.

Beta code development has the expectation of being one of the critical final phases before the potential public release of Version 1.0 software. Beta software is used with the expectation and understanding that there may still be minor to fatal bugs or security vulnerabilities hidden within this Beta software code or associated processes that may not have been uncovered by previous security reviews, testing, or audits.

Blockchain

An immutable permanent public record or ledger of all transactions since the beginning of a cryptocurrency coin or token.

BSC

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is a blockchain network built for running smart contract-based applications. BSC runs in parallel with Binance’s native Binance Chain (BC), which allows users to get the best of both worlds: the high transaction capacity of BC and the smart contract functionality of BSC.

Bull market

A period marked by prevailing positive investor sentiment about an asset or class of assets. A bull market can last weeks, months, or years, and can sometimes be marked by what economists call a Bubble, where there may be irrational overenthusiasm about an asset or class of assets, leading to explosive price growth followed by an explosive price crash.

CeFi

Centralized Finance. In terms of cryptocurrency, CeFi is represented by centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, businesses, or organizations with a physical address, and usually with some sort of corporate structure. These CeFi businesses must follow all applicable laws, rules, and regulations in each country, state, or region in which they operate.

CEX

A CEX is a Centralized Exchange, with a physical address and a corporate structure. Like other CeFi businesses, a CEX must follow all applicable laws, rules, money transmitter licenses, and regulations in each country, state, or region in which they operate. There are significant overhead costs in running a CEX including Corporate leaders, labor, rent and electricity, office supplies, significant legal expenses, and expensive money transmitter licenses to be able to operate in chosen countries, states, or regions.

cNFT

Credit non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a digital ledger (blockchain). Each cNFT is generated with a decentralized identity (DID) at its core and includes:

● The status of assets across all wallet addresses associated with the DID

● The transaction history as well as present status on each DeFi protocol

● The credit rating calculated by the CreDA Credit Oracle

The CreDA protocol maintains sufficient operating assets and corresponding cross-chain interfaces for each cNFT.

Coin

A form of digital currency primarily used for payments or storage of wealth. Coins are secured by encryption algorithms. The market price of the coin represents the value of the ownership of a divisible unit of the coin or token (another name for a coin, but a type of coin with greater functionality) at a given moment in time. This coin or token can represent a share of the ownership and/or governance of a coin, token, protocol, company, or project and all of the benefits that this may entail.

Collateralization

The borrowing of a deposit asset or assets to seek further business activities such as Yield Farming. Collateralization can amplify gains or losses, and is thus, considered riskier than not borrowing funds.

Compound Interest

Once called the eighth wonder of the world by Einstein, compound interest allows greater interest rates and returns on investments by allowing interest gained to be automatically reinvested back in with the original deposits and accrued interest. This reinvestment period is based on the planned distribution of this interest which may be hourly, weekly, monthly, or an annual interest distribution.

With compound interest, the greatest gains are often seen over a certain period in time, with a notably sharp rise in the value of investments seen at longer periods. In general, the longer a deposit benefits from compound interest, the much greater the overall gains when compared to gains made from simple interest.

CreDA

​CreDA (Credit Data Alliance) is the world's first decentralized credit rating service/protocol.

The CreDA credit rating system is based on the decentralized identifier (DID) protocol, utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to compute user credit scores through its proprietary CreDA Credit Oracle.

CREDA

CREDA is the governance token issued by the CreDA protocol. It is a core element in promoting the development of the CreDA network. Based on the economic model of the protocol, all participants are incentivized to participate in the maintenance and development of the entire ecosystem through the community governance mechanism.

Credit history

Your credit history is a measure of your ability to repay debts and demonstrated responsibility in repaying them. It is recorded in your credit report, which details the number and types of your credit accounts, how long each account has been open, amounts owed, the amount of available credit used, whether bills are paid on time, and the number of recent credit inquiries. Your credit report also contains information regarding whether you have any bankruptcies, liens, collections, or judgments.

Credit rating

The term credit rating refers to a quantified assessment of a borrower's creditworthiness in general terms or with respect to a particular debt or financial obligation. A credit rating can be assigned to any entity that seeks to borrow money—an individual, a corporation, a state or provincial authority, or a sovereign government.

Credit report

A credit report is a detailed breakdown of an individual's credit history prepared by a credit bureau. Credit bureaus collect financial information about individuals and create credit reports based on that information, and lenders use the reports along with other details to determine loan applicants' creditworthiness.

Credit risk

Credit risk is the possibility of a loss resulting from a borrower's failure to repay a loan or meet contractual obligations.

Credit score

A credit score is a number between 300–1000 that depicts a consumer's creditworthiness. The higher the score, the better a borrower looks to potential lenders. A credit score is based on credit history: number of open accounts, total levels of debt, and repayment history, and other factors. Lenders use credit scores to evaluate the probability that an individual will repay loans in a timely manner.

Creditworthiness

Creditworthiness is how a lender determines that you will default on your debt obligations, or how worthy you are to receive new credit. Your creditworthiness is what creditors look at before they approve any new credit to you.

Creditworthiness is determined by several factors including your repayment history and credit score. Some lending institutions also consider available assets and the number of liabilities you have when they determine the probability of default.

Cryptocurrency

A form of digital currency protected by encryption algorithms and represented as a digital coin or token. Cryptocurrency coins are programmed to systems and networks for:

• Minting

• Release

• Reward

• Distribution

• Governance

• Ability to make future changes

These digital coins or tokens include a ledger or blockchain record of all transactions that occur on their respective networks.

dApp

A 21st-century invention, a dApp is a decentralized Web3 application that normally runs on a blockchain. Advantages of dApps are that: they allow for new solutions to problems, they are decentralized and are thus rugged, and they are resistant to outages and censorship.

dApps can provide decentralized software application services - such as the Brave browser - but it can also be used to trace and track goods, and can be used to enable international financial transactions without the delay, costs, and hassle of middlemen and bureaucracy. They can also be a keystone to the functionality of complex decentralized exchanges and crypto financial services such as price oracles.

DAO

Distributed Autonomous Organization. The first DAO was started in 2016. According to Wikipedia's definition, it is an:

"organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a central government. A DAO's financial transaction record and program rules are maintained on a blockchain."

When implemented well, a DAO allows for real-world experiments in decentralized democratic organization and control, with more freedom of action and less regulatory oversight for DAO controlled projects and products when compared to legacy corporate structures and organizations.

DeFi

DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is at its root a set of Smart Contracts running independently on blockchains such as the Ethereum network. Smart Contracts may or may not interact with other smart contracts and even other blockchains.

The goal of DeFi is to enhance the profitability of investors in DeFi through automated smart contracts seeking to maximize yields for invested funds. DeFi is marked by rapid innovative progression and testing of new ideas and concepts.

DeFi often involves high risk investing sometimes involving smart contracts that have not been audited or even thoroughly reviewed (a review is not as comprehensive as an audit, but may also be included as part of an audit). Due to this and other reasons, DeFi is conventionally considered to be riskier than CeFi or traditional investing.

Delegation

The concept of permitting a person, company, or organization the ability to borrow utilizing another owner's deposited collateral.

Derivative

In investing, a derivative is an investment instrument or tool that is based on an underlying asset or assets. Investopedia describes it thus:

Derivatives can be used to hedge a position, speculate on the directional movement of an underlying asset, or give leverage to holdings. Their value comes from the fluctuations of the values of the underlying asset. Originally, derivatives were used to ensure balanced exchange rates for goods traded internationally.

In DeFi, since 2020 there now exists a crypto derivative that is a new type of investment or asset class. This crypto derivative is a representation of an underlying digital base asset such as Ethereum, Dai, Curve, or YFI. Examples of their respective derivatives are yETH, aDAI, yCRV, and yYFI.

DEX

Decentralized EXchange. A cryptocurrency exchange that is decentralized, without a physical location. It is a Peer-2-Peer network operating on Smart Contracts where users buy and sell directly to one another, with only the DEX as a middleman. Without the high overhead and regulatory costs of doing business as a CEX, a DEX does not have to follow the stricter rules and regulations that CEXs must follow, and thus can be leaner, more profitable, and more efficient than a CEX.

DID

Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity. In contrast to typical, federated identifiers, DIDs have been designed so that they may be decoupled from centralized registries, identity providers, and certificate authorities.

Ethereum

Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency but Ethereum, which launched in July 2015, allows for much more complexity through the use of smart contracts and a Turing complete programming language.

Thanks to the ERC-20 protocol, Ethereum has many cryptocurrency coins such as LINK, CRV and YFI built on top of Ethereum, each with their own set of rules.

Elastos

Elastos is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, employing not only blockchain technology, but a peer-to-peer network for communication, decentralized data storage services, and a decentralized ID system for all users and digital assets.

ERC-20

A cryptocurrency protocol based on the Ethereum blockchain. An ERC-20 coin, by definition, uses this protocol.

ESC

Elastos Smart Chain

To reduce the pressure on the main chain and provide a better experience for DApps, Elastos adopts a main chain+Sidechain hierarchical structure. The main chain is only responsible for the circulation of ELA. DApps runs on Sidechains, and through the Elastos main chain+Sidechain transfer mechanism, the secure transfer of value between the main chain and the Sidechain is completed.

Equifax

Equifax is a credit bureau. Equifax tracks the credit history of borrowers in order to generate credit reports and credit scores. It sells this information to banks and other financial institutions in order to help them determine the credit risk of their customers

Experian

Experian collects and aggregates information on over 1 billion people and businesses including 235 million individual U.S. consumers and more than 25 million U.S. businesses. ... Its consumer services include online access to credit history and products meant to protect from fraud and identity theft.

Fair Launch

A concept where a Developer decides to not seek outside investment and also does not hold back a share of a coin or token's launch for themselves or others. This is considered to be much fairer to early investors as their share of equity or ownership of a coin or token is not diluted by pre-investors or founders/founding teams.

Fair Launch Coin or Token

A Fair Launch coin or token is characterized by a launch that is fair to the public. This means that there was no Founder, Foundation or Development Team, Venture Capitalist, or early investor pre-allocation or pre-mining program to privately claim a portion of a coin's supply before its release for sale to the public. Fiat

Investopedia's definition:

Fiat money is a government-issued currency that is not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver, but rather by the government that issued it.

It usually requires fiat exchanged at a CEX or through local means such as Bitcoin ATMs to be able to purchase cryptocurrency with fiat currency.

FICO

A FICO score is a credit score created by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO). Lenders use borrowers’ FICO scores along with other details on borrowers’ credit reports to assess credit risk and determine whether to extend credit. FICO scores take into account data in five areas to determine credit worthiness: payment history, the current level of indebtedness, types of credit used, length of credit history, and new credit accounts.

Financial Primitive

A cryptocurrency-based financial generic building block. Financial Primitives are designed to efficiently and reliably perform one task. Financial Primitives may be combined to create smart contracts. These smart contract may even be stacked upon one another to implement financial trading strategies.

Flash Loan

A type of loan that is only possible in the world of cryptocurrencies. A Flash Loan is a type of loan where the asset, often Ethereum or an ERC-20 coin, is loaned out only for the duration of the length of time it takes to complete one transaction block on the blockchain. As long as the loan is paid back before the next transaction block begins there is no interest fee incurred by the borrower.

Flash Loans allow for new types of investments that are nearly instantaneous algorithmic scripts to run in Smart Contracts that can be stacked upon one another for innovative yet sometimes risky investments. Flash Loans may also have vulnerabilities that may include systems vulnerabilities that take advantage of approved existing systems but are used in a novel malicious manner.

FOMO

Fear Of Missing Out. The feeling that everyone else seems to be getting rich, profiting, or generally having a great time without you. In investing, it's a feeling that your current portfolio isn't performing well enough when compared to newer and "shinier" investment choices and options.

Forced Liquidation

Forced Liquidation is defined as:

In the context of cryptocurrencies, forced liquidation happens when the investor or trader is unable to fulfill the margin requirements for a leveraged position. The concept of liquidation applies to both futures and margin trading.

Gas Fees

Gas fees are rewards paid to Proof Of Work miners to incentivize them to support the network's transactions which become written to the blockchain. In Ethereum, this gas fee unit amount is expressed in gwei. Withdrawals or transfers to or from CEXs, DEXs Liquidity Pools, and Wallets all incur a gas fee. The amount of this gas fee will vary in cost depending on supply and demand. As currently designed: when demand on Ethereum or an ERC-20 network is at its highest, gas fees are at also their highest.

Governance

Governance refers to the control and use of a Governance coin, token, and/or project through various measures to grow the ecosystem or product and to maximize gains for governance token holders.

Governance Token

A token is used to govern the operations and influence the direction of a coin, token, and/or project controlled by the Governance Token. Holding these tokens are often profitable through direct price appreciation of popular governance tokens, but may come with other benefits that are only available to governance token holders and voters.

Gwei

A unit of measurement of gas fees for transactions on the Ethereum network or ERC-20 coin networks.

HeCo

Huobi Eco Chain (Heco) is an EVM-based blockchain that uses HT as the native currency. HT is the Huobi token. Heco is using POS consensus with a maximum of 21 Validators. The level of decentralization is not as high as Ethereum, but Heco allows much faster and cheaper transactions.

HODL

A misspelled word by a crypto investor on an online forum from the early days of cryptocurrency, HODL became a term that was embraced as an inside joke by the nascent community of investors, coders, and entrepreneurs who supported coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum in the early days. They believe in the long-term promise of cryptocurrencies and held their investments through periods of massive volatility or even no volatility (i.e., price stagnation).

The choice or decision to hold onto one's crypto investments through bull and bear markets is called HODLing.

HODLer

One who HODLs.

Impermanent Loss

In Automated Market Makers (AMM) lending providers (LPs) contribute assets for liquidity to market participants. These AMM pools utilize a bonding curve, typically built on a constant function market marker formula. Asset prices are constantly changed by the AMM pool in response to trading activities by participants. This is an effort to ensure that LPs can receive the same amount of assets they deposited when they withdrawal.

However, due to the volatility of asset prices and arbitragers, LPs occasionally will not receive the exact amount of assets upon withdrawal. The dollar value of the assets they withdraw would typically be lower than if they had no provided liquidity and just held the assets. This dollar value shortfall is known as impermanent loss. The loss is said to be impermanent because if asset prices return to the level during withdrawal the loss is eliminated.

Institutional Investor

The Dictionary definition:

a large organization, such as a bank, pension fund, labor union, or insurance company, that makes substantial investments on the stock exchange.

In CeFi & DeFi, traditional institutional investors have an easier on-ramp into cryptocurrency should they seek higher yields albeit at higher risks.

We have also seen a rise of a new type of a virtual mutual fund, a decentralized cryptocurrency funded mutual fund controlled by governance tokens and Smart Contracts called a Cryptocurrency Institutional Investor.

Lending Aggregator

A program or set of smart contracts that automatically seeks the best lending rates for depositors loaning coins for returns on their investment or ROI.

Lending Provider

A Lending Provider is a person or group who provides cryptocurrency capital in exchange for a share of rewards and fees gained by lending out and providing liquidity for various cryptocurrency coins and their respective networks. Loans are provided to traders, investors, exchanges, cryptocurrency networks, DAOs, and CIIs to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities and business opportunities by actors within the CeFi and DeFi space.

Leverage

The use of multipliers on exchanges or markets that allow leveraged trading, such that providing 1 BTC deposit on such an exchange could provide the investment power of 10 to 100 BTC if used at 10x to 100x leverage.

Leveraged trades can amplify gains greatly. However, should the trade be unprofitable, it can also amplify losses greatly. The downside of this risky approach is that the entire deposit, 1 BTC in this example, could be lost in a liquidation event where a margin call on this leveraged trade could result in the entire deposit being lost during times of massive volatility and insufficient reserve funds for the investor, trader, or CII.

Liquidation Event

Another term for a Forced Liquidation, where due to rapid market changes, or a change in prevailing market sentiment, a trader or investor is unable to meet a margin call on their leveraged investment, their trading position is eliminated or liquidated, and the investor loses all or part of their initial investment(s).

Liquidity

A measure of how much available circulating supply there is of an asset or currency, and the activity of that asset or currency in an exchange, economy, or network. A currency with low supply and/or circulation is said to be illiquid.

Liquidity Mining

An energy-efficient form of cryptocurrency mining that supports work and transactions on a blockchain usually without expensive application or hardware-specific equipment required by older forms of cryptocurrency mining.

Rewards are provided to liquidity providers as a means to incentivize liquidity mining providers, in addition to growing and supporting a blockchain's user base.

Liquidity Pool

An LP, or Liquidity Pool, is a pool of deposited funds meant to provide liquidity to a currency, network, or Smart Contract. Liquidity is considered the lifeblood of any physical or digital currency, exchange, or financial network, so there will be designed rewards or incentives given to those who provide liquidity to LPs.

Liquidity Providers

In the realm of cryptocurrency and DeFi, this refers to investors who deposit an asset to provide liquidity on an exchange and/or network(s) to gain an ROI on their investment. Investors deposit one or more of their digital assets into decentralized Liquidity Pools (LPs) to provide liquid capital to exchanges and smart contracts. Liquidity Providers often provide two or more types of assets, in which Impermanent Loss is sometimes seen.

Liquidity Token

Implemented via Smart Contracts, a liquidity token is given to a depositor in exchange for that investor's deposit(s) to be used. A liquidity token can be exchanged back.

LTV

The loan-to-value (LTV) ratio is an assessment of lending risk that financial institutions and other lenders examine before approving a mortgage. Typically, loan assessments with high LTV ratios are considered higher-risk loans. Therefore, if the mortgage is approved, the loan has a higher interest rate.

Margin

An available avenue of borrowed capital that is considered very high risk, as collateral must be provided for a margin loan to secure the loan. It is called margin or a margin loan because a risky loan is being taken on the margins of the investment to hopefully amplify gains for the investor or trader.

A margin loan is considered very high risk as the deposited base asset is at risk of liquidation during a margin call.

Margin Call

The act of implementing a Forced Liquidation or Liquidation Event when an investor or trader cannot meet debt obligations on leveraged trade positions. Margin calls can be triggered by rapidly changing market conditions and high volatility that bring Liquidation Events for some leveraged traders on exchanges and markets.

Marketcap

Market Capitalization. A measure of the total funds invested in a company or project. This market cap of a coin, company, or project can be calculated by multiplying the asset's unit price by the total number of coins.

MetaMask

MetaMask is a popular mobile or desktop software cryptocurrency wallet that can hold, transmit or receive Ethereum and ERC-20 compatible coins or tokens.

Mining Pool

A pool of cryptocurrency miners that provides mining services to a cryptocurrency network. Mining Pool operators and contributors are incentivized by a coin or token's programmed mining rewards to support transactions and provide liquidity on a coin's network.

NFT

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a digital ledger (blockchain).NFTs can be used to represent easily-reproducible items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files as unique items, and use blockchain technology to establish a verified and public proof of ownership.

Oracle

A feed of data, such as the current market prices of an asset or assets, that provides a high confidence service to users and other services that the source and detail of the oracle's data are timely, accurate, and untampered. Sources of data may be singular or decentralized sources and may be dispersed geographically from one another. All exchanges and markets require accurate and timely information to operate properly at high efficiency. An example of the most well-known oracle protocol is Chainlink (LINK).

Pool

A smart contract containing shared amounts of assets provided by depositors. Pools are either used in Automated Market Makers (AMMs)for optimized trading purposes, lending aggregation (yPool), or in shared yield farming strategies (yVaults), among other things.

Primitive

A generic building block.

Protocol

In High Technology, a protocol is a set of developed rules or specifications. These rules detail definitions, standards, limitations, and potential stipulations of a protocol. Examples of technology protocols include TCP/IP and ERC-20.

Rebalance

1. To make changes to a portfolio or pool of funds for various reasons.

2. An automated or manual tactical change to a yield farming strategy that is meant to nearly instantaneously do one or more of the following actions:

   • Gain profits through arbitrage

   • Take or secure profits

   • Reduce risks to investors or pooled funds

During periods of high volatility, the latter is especially the case if margin or leveraged funding is used by the trader, investor, or controller in charge of pooled funds. If an assessment is made that market conditions are a risk to invested funds, mitigation efforts will be implemented either autonomously or through manual intervention to reduce risks to invested funds.

Retail Investor

A non-professional individual investor who buys, sells, lends and/or yield farms cryptocurrencies, crypto derivatives, and crypto offerings. Retail investors pay full retail price for their transactions, instead of benefitting volume discounts and other preferential treatment reserved for whales and CIIs.

ROI

Return On Investment. The gains or losses on an investment. For example, doubling your investment in an asset would be a 100% gain, or 100% ROI. Losing all of your investment would be a 100% loss, or -100% ROI.

Savings rate

The savings rate is the percentage of disposable personal income that a person or group of people save rather than spend on consumption.

Slippage

In trade, there is almost always a spread between the price that a buyer will pay and the price that a seller will sell an asset. When an order is made, this difference in price between buyer and seller expectations results in price slippage. This slippage in price is usually 1-3% but can be even more for coins with limited liquidity. This slippage can lead to a final sale price of the asset that is either more or less than the requested transaction amount.

Smart Contract

A digital contract that is programmed in a language that is considered Turing complete, meaning that with enough processing power and time, a properly programmed Smart Contract should be able to use its code base and logical algorithms to perform almost any digital task or process. Ethereum's programming languages, such as Solidity and Vyper, are Turing complete.

Spread

When an order is made on an exchange or market, the disagreement of the difference in price between potential buy and sell offers of an asset is called the spread. A widespread in price can lead to higher slippage.

Stablecoin

In cryptocurrency, it is a digital cryptocurrency equivalent to one (1) Dollar USD. In theory, the price of the stablecoin is pegged to the US Dollar, but in practice, there is some variance to nearly all stablecoins except for coins like DAI, which are designed with no volatility.

A stablecoin is an attractive investment to investors because:

• It can be used as a safe harbor or hedge for cryptocurrency funds in times of downward volatility, also known as a bear market, whether this trend in downward volatility is temporary or prolonged in duration.

• It can be used as diversification into the realm of Cryptocurrency finance to take advantage of new products in CeFi and DeFi that are unavailable elsewhere, as a safe diversification into crypto that won't lose nor gain significant value to the stablecoin price.

• A coin with a stable price is used for transferring crypto around, as a means to not lose value in the base asset itself as its being moved around or deployed to Smart Contracts or wallets.

Stake

The act of depositing a cryptocurrency coin or token into a yield farming project and/or protocol, whether the access to the project is either through CeFi or DeFi methods.

Stakers hope to gain interest on their deposits into these yield farming projects and offerings. CeFi is considered safer for several reasons - including strict rules, permitting, and regulations. However, DeFi tends to give much high rewards, while being accompanied with much higher risks, the earlier the investor participates in the project's lifecycle, testing, and development.

Staking

The act of staking a cryptocurrency deposit to yield farm additional cryptocurrency via CeFi or DeFi staking offerings, programs, or projects.

Testnet

A testing network for a new coin, project, or product, or for potential improvements to an existing product or offering. Testnets are used to test the viability and vulnerability of new ideas, concepts, code, and processes prior to moving on to a production network or networks of some sort.

Token

A type of coin, except with much greater functionality. Tokens can also be used as a method of payment like coins, but unlike coins, they can excel at other use cases such as the democratic governance of a protocol or system, or as a means to use underlying coins to make liquidity tokens from these coin deposits.

These liquidity tokens could then be used in innovative new strategies elsewhere via delegated funds to amplify gains with little risk to the underlying asset the liquidity token is based upon. An investor could choose this action so that further gains to their assets may be made by using the automated actions of intelligent Smart Contracts to optimize gains.

TransUnion

TransUnion is a credit bureau. It tracks the credit history of borrowers in order to generate credit reports and credit scores. Like Equifax and Experian, the other “Big Three” credit bureaus, TransUnion collects data to produce a credit history for every individual, and financial institutions look at these reports when determining whether to extend credit such as a mortgage or a credit card to a customer.

TVL

The Total Value Locked into a Smart Contract or set of Smart Contracts that may be deployed or stored at one or more exchanges or markets. This is used as a measurement of investor deposits. It is the dollar value of all the coins or tokens locked into a platform, protocol, lending program, yield farming program, or insurance liquidity pool.

Volatility

In investing, a measure of how rapid changes are seen to the price of an asset or market. Newer early-stage technology companies and projects in the explosive growth stage tend to see very high volatility in the price of their assets in their early days. Should the company or project behind the volatile asset see their venture survive over time, this volatility tends to be much reduced as the company's market cap grows and matures.

Wallet

A software or hardware cryptocurrency wallet that can hold a variety of coins.

Wallets may also be considered a cold wallet - meant to be used for long term storage of crypto coins for security purposes or a hot wallet, which is considered more at risk than a cold wallet due to its inaccessibility (usually offline). A hot wallet is meant to be used for active or semi-active transactions in and out of that wallet, as well as a place to withdraw or add funds.

Whale

A person who HODLs a large amount of cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies.

Zhima

also known as Sesame Credit, is a private credit scoring and loyalty program system developed by Ant Group, an affiliate of the Chinese Alibaba Group. It uses data from Alibaba's services to compile its score. Customers receive a score based on a variety of factors based on social media interactions and purchases carried out on Alibaba Group websites or paid for using its affiliate Ant Financial's Alipay mobile wallet. The rewards of having a high score include easier access to loans from Ant Financial and having a more trustworthy profile on e-commerce sites within the Alibaba Group.