Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Abbreviations
74 abbreviations · part of Technology & Computer Abbreviations
Abbreviations from cryptocurrency and blockchain technology: coin and token tickers (BTC, ETH), consensus mechanisms (PoW, PoS), decentralized finance (DeFi, DEX, AMM), token standards, regulation, and the trading slang of crypto communities (HODL, FUD, DYOR). Prices and rankings change quickly, so entries explain what each term means rather than quoting current figures; nothing here is investment advice.
| Abbreviation | Stands for | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ADA | Cardano | The native cryptocurrency of Cardano, a proof-of-stake blockchain founded by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson and developed with an emphasis on peer-reviewed… |
| AMM | Automated market maker | A smart-contract system that prices and executes trades using a mathematical formula and pools of tokens supplied by users, instead of matching buyers and sellers in an… |
| ATH | All-time high | Highest price, value or level an asset, index or metric has ever reached. |
| ATL | All-time low | Lowest price or level an asset or measure has ever reached since trading or recording began. |
| BCH | Bitcoin Cash | A cryptocurrency created by a hard fork of bitcoin on August 1, 2017, raising the block size limit so more transactions fit in each block, with the aim of cheap… |
| BIP | Bitcoin Improvement Proposal | A design document proposing changes to bitcoin's protocol, software or conventions, numbered and reviewed by the community. |
| BNB | BNB (formerly Binance Coin) | The native token of BNB Chain, the blockchain ecosystem created by the exchange Binance. |
| BTC | Bitcoin | Bitcoin, the first and largest cryptocurrency by market value, quoted on exchanges and price trackers under the ticker BTC. |
| BTFD | Buy the f***ing dip | Trading slang urging people to buy an asset after its price falls, on the belief that it will rebound. |
| CBDC | Central bank digital currency | Digital form of a country's money issued directly by its central bank, as distinct from commercial bank deposits or private cryptocurrencies. |
| CDP | Collateralized debt position | A smart-contract loan in which a user locks crypto collateral to borrow or mint a stablecoin, with the collateral automatically liquidated if its value falls below a… |
| CeFi | Centralized finance | Crypto financial services run by companies that take custody of customers' funds, such as centralized exchanges and crypto lending platforms, in contrast to… |
| CEX | Centralized exchange | A cryptocurrency exchange operated by a company that holds customers' funds and matches trades on its own order book, such as Coinbase, Binance or Kraken. |
| DAO | Decentralized autonomous organization | An organization governed by rules encoded in smart contracts, where members holding its tokens propose and vote on decisions such as spending from a shared treasury… |
| DApp | Decentralized application | An application whose backend logic runs as smart contracts on a blockchain rather than on a company's servers, usually used through a web front end and a crypto wallet. |
| DCA | Dollar-cost averaging | Strategy of investing a fixed amount of money at regular intervals, such as monthly, regardless of price, so more shares are bought when prices are low and fewer when… |
| DeFi | Decentralized finance | Financial services such as lending, borrowing, trading, derivatives and savings provided by smart contracts on public blockchains, without banks or brokers as… |
| DePIN | Decentralized physical infrastructure networks | Crypto projects that use token rewards to encourage people to build and run real-world infrastructure, such as wireless hotspots, storage, sensors, mapping cameras or… |
| DEX | Decentralized exchange | A cryptocurrency exchange run by smart contracts, where users trade directly from their own wallets without depositing funds with a company. |
| DLT | Distributed ledger technology | Databases that are shared, replicated and synchronized across many participants without a central administrator, using consensus rules to agree on updates. |
| DOGE | Dogecoin | A cryptocurrency created in December 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a joke based on the Shiba Inu "Doge" meme, which became one of the largest coins thanks… |
| DOT | Polkadot | The native token of Polkadot, a multichain network that connects specialized blockchains, called parachains, to a central relay chain that shares security among them. |
| DPoS | Delegated proof of stake | A variant of proof of stake in which coin holders vote for a small number of delegates, or block producers, who validate transactions on their behalf. |
| DYOR | Do your own research | Advice to investigate a claim or investment independently rather than relying on others' opinions, common in crypto, investing and online debates. |
| EIP | Ethereum Improvement Proposal | A design document proposing a change to Ethereum's protocol, client software or standards, debated publicly and adopted through network upgrades. |
| ENS | Ethereum Name Service | A naming system on Ethereum that maps human-readable names ending in .eth, such as alice.eth, to wallet addresses, content hashes and other records, much as DNS maps… |
| ERC-20 | Ethereum Request for Comments 20 | The technical standard for fungible tokens on Ethereum, defining functions such as transfer, balanceOf and approve so wallets and exchanges can support any compliant… |
| ERC-721 | Ethereum Request for Comments 721 | The Ethereum standard for non-fungible tokens, in which each token has a unique ID and can represent a distinct item such as artwork, a game asset or a domain name. |
| ETC | Ethereum Classic | The original Ethereum blockchain that continued unchanged after the 2016 DAO hack, when most of the community adopted a hard fork reversing the theft and kept the… |
| ETH | Ether | The native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, used to pay transaction fees ("gas") and staked as collateral in the network's proof-of-stake consensus. |
| EVM | Ethereum Virtual Machine | The runtime environment that executes smart contracts on Ethereum, processing bytecode on every node and charging gas for each operation. |
| FDV | Fully diluted valuation | A token's price multiplied by its maximum or total eventual supply, including tokens not yet released, showing what the project would be worth if every token were… |
| FUD | Fear, uncertainty and doubt | Negative or misleading information spread to make people worried about an asset, product or company. |
| Gwei | Gigawei | A denomination of ether equal to one billionth (0.000000001) of an ETH, or one billion wei, used to quote Ethereum gas prices. |
| HD | Hierarchical deterministic (wallet) | A wallet design in which every key and address is derived from a single seed, usually backed up as a 12- or 24-word recovery phrase, so restoring that phrase recovers… |
| HODL | Hold on for dear life (backronym) | Crypto slang for holding an asset long term instead of selling during price drops or chasing short-term trades. |
| ICO | Initial coin offering | A fundraising method in which a crypto project sells newly created tokens to the public, usually for bitcoin or ether, to finance development. |
| IEO | Initial exchange offering | A token sale run on a centralized exchange's platform, which vets the project, handles identity checks and lists the token for trading afterward. |
| IL | Impermanent loss | The shortfall a liquidity provider suffers, compared with simply holding the tokens, when the prices of the pooled tokens change relative to each other. |
| IPFS | InterPlanetary File System | A peer-to-peer protocol for storing and sharing files addressed by their content hash rather than their location, so any node holding a file can serve it. |
| KYC | Know your customer | Process banks and other financial institutions use to verify customers' identities and assess their risk, collecting documents such as photo ID, proof of address and… |
| L1 | Layer 1 | A base blockchain that processes and finalizes transactions on its own network, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana. |
| L2 | Layer 2 | A network or protocol built on top of a base blockchain to process transactions more cheaply and quickly while relying on the underlying chain for security. |
| LN | Lightning Network | A layer-2 payment network built on bitcoin in which users open payment channels and route instant, low-fee transactions off-chain, settling final balances on the… |
| LP | Liquidity provider | A user who deposits pairs of tokens into a decentralized exchange pool so others can trade against it, earning a share of trading fees in return. |
| LTC | Litecoin | An early cryptocurrency launched in October 2011 by former Google engineer Charlie Lee as a faster, lighter alternative to bitcoin, with 2.5-minute blocks and a maximum… |
| MEV | Maximal extractable value | The profit that block producers, or bots working with them, can capture by including, excluding or reordering transactions in a block, through tactics such as… |
| MiCA | Markets in Crypto-Assets (Regulation) | The European Union's comprehensive regulation for crypto assets, setting licensing, disclosure and consumer-protection rules for crypto service providers and for… |
| MPC | Multi-party computation | A cryptographic technique in which several parties jointly compute a result, such as a transaction signature, without any of them revealing its secret input. |
| NFA | Not financial advice | A disclaimer added to social media posts and videos about investments, especially crypto, signaling that the author is sharing an opinion rather than professional advice. |
| NFT | Non-fungible token | A unique digital token recorded on a blockchain that proves ownership of, or rights to, a specific item such as digital art, a collectible, an in-game item or a ticket. |
| NGMI | Not gonna make it | Pessimistic or mocking judgment that a person, project or investment will fail, the opposite of WAGMI. |
| P2E | Play-to-earn | A blockchain gaming model in which players earn cryptocurrency or NFTs through gameplay that they can sell for real money. |
| PFP | Profile picture | The image shown next to a username on social media, forums, Discord and messaging apps. |
| PoA | Proof of authority | A consensus mechanism in which a small set of approved, publicly identified validators produce blocks, relying on their reputation rather than mining or staked coins. |
| PoS | Proof of stake | A consensus mechanism in which validators lock up, or "stake", the network's coins as collateral for the right to propose and confirm blocks, earning rewards for honest… |
| PoW | Proof of work | A consensus mechanism in which miners compete to solve a computational puzzle by repeatedly hashing data, and the winner adds the next block and earns a reward. |
| RWA | Real-world assets | Traditional assets such as government bonds, real estate, private credit and commodities represented as tokens on a blockchain, so they can be traded, used as… |
| SAFU | Secure Asset Fund for Users | An emergency fund created by the exchange Binance in 2018 and financed by a share of trading fees, meant to compensate users in extreme cases such as hacks. "Funds are… |
| sats | Satoshis | The smallest units of bitcoin, each worth one hundred-millionth (0.00000001) of a bitcoin and named after the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. |
| SOL | Solana | The native token of Solana, a high-throughput blockchain that combines proof of stake with a timekeeping technique called proof of history and is known for low fees and… |
| SPV | Simplified payment verification | A method, described in the bitcoin white paper, that lets lightweight wallets confirm a transaction is included in a block by downloading only block headers and a short… |
| STO | Security token offering | A sale of blockchain tokens that represent regulated securities, such as shares, bonds or fund units, carried out under securities laws with investor checks and… |
| TVL | Total value locked | The total market value of crypto assets deposited in a DeFi protocol or blockchain, such as funds in lending pools, liquidity pools and staking contracts, used as a… |
| USDC | USD Coin | A dollar-backed stablecoin issued by the US company Circle and backed by cash and short-term US Treasuries held at regulated institutions, with monthly attestations of… |
| USDT | Tether | The largest stablecoin, a token issued by Tether Limited that aims to hold a value of one US dollar backed by reserves such as Treasury bills, cash and other assets. |
| UTXO | Unspent transaction output | The accounting model used by bitcoin and similar blockchains, in which each transaction consumes earlier unspent outputs as inputs and creates new outputs; a wallet's… |
| VASP | Virtual asset service provider | The term used by the Financial Action Task Force and many regulators for businesses that exchange, transfer, hold or issue crypto assets for customers, such as… |
| WAGMI | We're all gonna make it | Optimistic slogan in crypto, NFT and startup communities expressing collective hope for success, especially during market downturns. |
| Web3 | Web 3.0 (decentralized web) | A vision of an internet built on blockchains, cryptocurrencies and tokens, in which users own their data and digital assets and interact through wallets instead of… |
| XBT | Bitcoin (ISO-style currency code) | An alternative code for bitcoin formed in the style of ISO 4217 currency codes, where an initial X marks currencies not tied to a country, as with XAU for gold. |
| XMR | Monero | A privacy-focused cryptocurrency that hides senders, recipients and amounts by default using ring signatures, stealth addresses and confidential transactions, unlike… |
| XRP | XRP | The native digital asset of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain designed for fast, low-cost payments and currency exchange and closely associated with the San Francisco… |
| ZKP | Zero-knowledge proof | A cryptographic method that lets one party prove a statement is true, such as having enough funds or knowing a password, without revealing anything else. |
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