Bitcoin glossary: Top 70 – Every blockchain and cryptocurrency phrase you need to know.

For those who don’t know the difference between a governance token and a memecoin.

Below is an alphabetical glossary of blockchain terms you might find useful. Note: It’s far from an exhaustive list of terms and phrases, but covers the basics. 

1.Airdrop

An airdrop is when a company drops cryptocurrency or an NFT directly into your wallet. Instead of an initial public offering, blockchain services will launch a token and airdrop users who have used that service in the past. This can be done for several reasons: It can be pure marketing, as airdrops raise awareness of a token which people can then invest in, or it can be to provide governance tokens for a DAO. 

A recent example: The Ethereum Name Service allows users to change their wallet number to a wallet name (like CNET.eth). In December, it launched its own ENS token, airdropping an amount to everyone who had used the service. The more people had used Ethereum Name Service, the more tokens they were airdropped — in some cases were worth tens of thousands of dollars.

2.Apeing

To “ape” into something is to recklessly invest in the hopes of short-term profit. Everyone knows scams abound, and careful investors do research to vet a cryptocurrency or NFT project to ensure it’s safe. To “ape” into a project is to see its value rising and to throw money into it hoping for the best. 

3.Altcoin

Any cryptocurrency that’s not bitcoin or ether. Many are also known as “shitcoins.“

4.Bag

Your bags are investments you hold over a long period of time, often ones that have performed poorly. “Hopefully the Bullrun pumps my bags.”

5.Binance

The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, where people buy and trade cryptocurrencies.

6.Blockchain 

A blockchain is a “distributed database.” In simpler terms, it’s a decentralized ledger that records information in digital “blocks.” Once a block is mined and added to the chain, it can’t be altered, thus blockchains offer public records of unchangeable data. 

There are many different blockchains that feature varying degrees of decentralization, efficiency, and security. Many have their own cryptocurrency — for instance, ether is a cryptocurrency built on the Ethereum blockchain.

7.Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, built on the Bitcoin blockchain. It was created in 2009 by a person or group of people under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Only 21 million can ever be minted, around 18.9 million of which are already in circulation.

8.Burning

Cryptocurrencies are “burned” by being sent to a wallet that can only receive them and not send them. Burn mechanics are often utilized to cause a deflationary impact: the fewer tokens in circulation, the more scarce the ones investors hold become. 

9.Buy the dip

This refers to buying more of an asset after its price has fallen. For instance, a bitcoin holder might “buy the dip” if the price falls by $10,000. 

10.Candlesticks 

Cryptocurrency graphs that chart price movement feature green and red bars — green for price going up, red for price going down — which are sometimes referred to as “candlesticks”. 

Green and red candlesticks. 

 Dextools 

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