Crypto, word by word.
Short, plain-English definitions of every term you'll meet — and links to the guides that go deeper. Look it up, get on with it.
Licensed. Operating since 2016, used in 100+ countries.
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A
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The string of letters and numbers that identifies a wallet on a blockchain — where crypto gets sent. Like an account number, except mistakes aren't reversible: crypto sent to the wrong address doesn't come back. Always check it character by character.
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A distribution of free tokens to wallet holders, usually to promote a new project. Real airdrops exist; so do fake ones designed to steal wallet access. The rule: anything that asks for your seed phrase or a deposit to "unlock" tokens is a scam.
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The highest price an asset has ever reached. Useful as a reference point, nothing more — an all-time high says where a price has been, not where it's going. Its opposite is the all-time low (ATL).
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Any cryptocurrency that isn't Bitcoin. The word is a contraction of "alternative coin" and covers everything from Ethereum to coins created last week. Being an altcoin says nothing about quality — it's a category, not a judgement.
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Anti-Money Laundering: the rules that require financial platforms to detect and report attempts to move illegally obtained money. Together with KYC checks, AML compliance is what separates licensed platforms from the ones that ask no questions.
B
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A sustained period of falling prices and low confidence — the opposite of a bull market. Bear markets are normal in crypto and have lasted many months before. A trend describes the past, not the future.
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The first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin runs on its own blockchain, has a fixed maximum supply of 21 million coins, and remains the largest cryptocurrency by market value. Everything else in crypto came after it.
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A batch of transactions recorded together on a blockchain. Each block links to the one before it, forming the chain. Once a block is confirmed by the network, changing it would mean redoing everything after it — which is what makes the record so durable.
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A shared record of transactions, maintained by thousands of computers instead of one company. Each new batch of transactions links to the last, which is what makes the history so hard to alter. Every cryptocurrency runs on one.
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A sustained period of rising prices and high confidence — the opposite of a bear market. Bull markets attract new buyers and loud predictions. The same caution applies in both directions: a trend describes the past, not the future.
C
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Crypto-Asset Service Provider: the EU's licence category for companies offering crypto services under MiCA, the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation. A CASP authorisation means a national regulator has approved the company to operate across the EU under one rulebook.
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A crypto platform run by a company that manages accounts, security and the matching of buyers and sellers. Centralized exchanges support cards and bank transfers, run KYC checks, and can be licensed and regulated — which is why most people start on one.
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A crypto wallet that stays offline — usually a small hardware device. Because it never touches the internet, it's the storage method most resistant to hacking, and the standard choice for larger amounts held long-term. The trade-off is convenience.
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Proof that the network has accepted a transaction into a block. Each additional block added afterwards counts as another confirmation, making the transaction progressively harder to reverse. Platforms typically wait for a set number before treating funds as final.
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Money that exists only online, secured by cryptography and recorded on a blockchain rather than by a bank. Cryptocurrencies can be sent anywhere without an intermediary, divided into tiny fractions, and held by anyone with a wallet.
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A wallet where a company holds the private keys on your behalf — the way a bank holds your money. Easier to use and recoverable if you lose access; the trade-off is trusting the custodian. The Xcoins Wallet is custodial, through regulated custody.
D
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Spreading control across many participants instead of one authority. A decentralized network keeps running even if individual participants fail or misbehave, because no single one of them is in charge. It's the design principle underneath every blockchain.
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A crypto exchange that runs as software on a blockchain, letting users trade directly from their own wallets — no company, no account, usually no KYC. More control, and more responsibility: there's no support desk if something goes wrong.
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Decentralized finance: financial services — trading, lending, borrowing — built as software on blockchains, without a company in the middle. DeFi removes intermediaries, and with them the protections intermediaries provide. It's a space for experienced users, not first purchases.
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Buying a fixed amount at regular intervals — say, $50 a month — instead of one lump sum. The approach spreads purchases across prices over time. It's a method some buyers use to remove timing decisions; it doesn't guarantee a better outcome.
E
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The technical standard most tokens on the Ethereum blockchain follow. If two tokens are both ERC-20, wallets and platforms can handle them the same way — which is why thousands of different tokens can live on one network without custom support for each.
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The second-largest cryptocurrency, launched in 2015. Ethereum's blockchain does more than record payments: it runs smart contracts — programs that execute automatically — which is why most tokens, NFTs and DeFi applications are built on it. Its currency is ether (ETH).
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A platform where cryptocurrencies are bought and sold — for regular money or for other crypto. Exchanges come centralized (run by a company, beginner-friendly, can be licensed) or decentralized (software only, no intermediary). Most first purchases happen on centralized ones.
F
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Government-issued money — dollars, euros, pounds. The word comes from the Latin for "let it be done": fiat money has value because a government declares it does, not because it's backed by a commodity. In crypto, "fiat" just means regular money.
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Fear of missing out: the urge to buy because a price is rising and everyone's talking about it. FOMO is the single most reliable way to buy high. If the only reason to buy is that it's going up, that isn't a reason.
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A change to a blockchain's rules. A soft fork updates the network in a backwards-compatible way; a hard fork splits it — part of the network adopts new rules and becomes a separate chain with its own coin. Bitcoin Cash began as a hard fork of Bitcoin.
G
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The fee paid to a blockchain's network for processing a transaction — the term comes from Ethereum. Gas fees go to the network, not to the platform you bought on, and they rise when the network is busy. Different blockchains charge very differently.
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The very first block of a blockchain — block zero, from which every later block descends. Bitcoin's genesis block, mined in January 2009, famously carries a newspaper headline about bank bailouts embedded in its data.
H
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A scheduled event on the Bitcoin network, roughly every four years, that cuts the reward miners receive for adding new blocks in half. Halvings slow the rate at which new bitcoin enters circulation, enforcing the fixed 21-million supply over time.
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A physical device — usually resembling a USB stick — that stores private keys offline. Transactions are signed on the device itself, so the keys never touch an internet-connected computer. It's the most common way to run a cold wallet.
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A fixed-length fingerprint generated from data — change one character of the input and the whole fingerprint changes. Blockchains use hashes to link blocks and detect tampering. Every transaction gets one, which is how you look it up on the network.
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Crypto slang for holding rather than selling, born from a 2013 forum post that misspelled "hold" mid-market-crash. It has since been backfilled as "hold on for dear life." Descriptive of a strategy some people follow; not a recommendation of one.
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A crypto wallet connected to the internet — an app on your phone, an extension in your browser. Convenient for everyday use and quick transactions; more exposed than cold storage precisely because it's online. Most people use both kinds for different jobs.
I
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Initial Coin Offering: a fundraising method where a new project sells its tokens to early buyers, loosely modelled on a stock market IPO. ICOs peaked in 2017–2018 and attracted heavy fraud alongside legitimate projects; regulation has since tightened considerably.
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The property that makes blockchain records effectively permanent: once a transaction is confirmed and buried under later blocks, altering it would require redoing the whole chain. It's why crypto has no chargebacks — and why checking details before sending matters so much.
K
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Know Your Customer: the identity check every licensed financial platform is required to run. You prove who you are with a photo ID, once. KYC keeps fraud and money laundering off the platform, and makes your account recoverable if you lose access.
L
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A record of transactions. A blockchain is a distributed ledger: instead of one institution keeping the books, thousands of computers keep identical copies and agree on every update. (Ledger is also the brand name of a popular hardware wallet — context tells you which.)
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How easily an asset can be bought or sold without moving its price. Bitcoin is highly liquid: there's always a buyer. A tiny new token may not be — selling it can be slow, expensive, or in the worst cases impossible. Low liquidity is a risk in itself.
M
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A coin's price multiplied by its circulating supply — the standard way to compare the size of cryptocurrencies. A high price alone means little: a coin at $1 with billions in circulation can be far larger than one at $1,000 with few coins issued.
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A cryptocurrency created around a joke, a mascot or an internet moment rather than a technical purpose — Dogecoin is the original. Memecoins can develop large communities and real markets; their prices tend to move on attention, which cuts both ways.
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Markets in Crypto-Assets: the EU regulation, in force since 2024, that gives crypto companies one rulebook across all member states. Under MiCA, providers are authorised by a national regulator as Crypto-Asset Service Providers (CASPs) and supervised like other financial firms.
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The work of confirming transactions and adding new blocks on proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin. Miners race to solve a computational puzzle; the winner adds the block and earns newly created coins plus fees. It's how the network stays secure without a boss.
N
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The fee a blockchain charges to process a transaction, paid to the miners or validators who run the network. It applies whenever crypto moves on-chain, varies with congestion, and is separate from any fee a platform charges. Gas fee is the Ethereum-specific name.
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Non-fungible token: a blockchain record representing ownership of one specific item — an image, a collectible, a ticket — rather than an interchangeable coin. "Non-fungible" means no two are alike, unlike bitcoins, where any one equals any other.
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A computer that participates in running a blockchain — storing a copy of the ledger, relaying transactions, checking that the rules are followed. The more independent nodes a network has, the harder it is for anyone to control or corrupt it.
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A wallet where you alone hold the private keys — no company can access, freeze or recover the funds. Full control, full responsibility: the seed phrase is the only backup, and losing it means losing the wallet. The opposite of a custodial wallet.
O
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On-chain means recorded on the blockchain itself — public, permanent, carrying a network fee. Off-chain means handled outside it, like a balance update inside one platform's own books, which is faster and free but relies on trusting that platform.
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An on-ramp is any service that converts regular money into crypto — a card purchase on a licensed platform is the classic example. An off-ramp does the reverse, turning crypto back into money in your bank account. Xcoins is both.
P
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Directly between two people, with no institution in the middle. Crypto networks are peer-to-peer by design: a transaction goes from one wallet to another without passing through a bank. P2P trading platforms apply the same idea to buying and selling itself.
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A scam that imitates something you trust — a platform's login page, a support email, a wallet pop-up — to steal credentials or a seed phrase. The defence is procedural: bookmark real sites, never click login links from messages, and remember that nobody legitimate asks for your recovery phrase.
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The secret code that controls a crypto wallet. Whoever holds the private key controls the funds — there's no "forgot password" on a blockchain. In a custodial wallet, the custodian manages it for you; in your own wallet, protecting it is the whole job.
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A way for a blockchain to agree on new transactions: validators lock up ("stake") their own coins as collateral for the right to confirm blocks, and lose part of it if they cheat. It uses far less energy than proof of work. Ethereum switched to it in 2022.
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The original way blockchains agree on new transactions: miners spend real computing power racing to solve a puzzle, and the network trusts the result because faking it would cost more than it pays. Bitcoin runs on proof of work.
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The shareable half of a wallet's key pair — your address is derived from it. Others use it to send you crypto; only the matching private key can spend what arrives. Sharing a public key is safe. Sharing the private one is losing the wallet.
R
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Another name for a seed phrase: the list of words that can restore a wallet on a new device. Different wallets use different labels — recovery phrase, secret phrase, backup phrase — for the same thing, and the same rule applies: offline, private, irreplaceable.
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A scam where a project's creators build hype, take in buyers' money, then abandon the project and drain its funds — pulling the rug out. Common warning signs: anonymous teams, guaranteed returns, and pressure to buy before some deadline. Established coins on licensed platforms are the boring antidote.
S
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The smallest unit of bitcoin — one hundred-millionth of a coin — named after Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshis are why "Bitcoin is too expensive" misunderstands the maths: you buy an amount of money's worth, not a whole coin.
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A list of 12–24 ordinary words that can restore a crypto wallet — generated once, when the wallet is created. Anyone with the phrase controls the wallet, so it's written down and stored offline, never photographed or typed into a website. Lose it, and there's no recovery.
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A program stored on a blockchain that runs automatically when its conditions are met — money moves when the code says so, with no one executing it manually. Smart contracts are the machinery behind tokens, NFTs and DeFi. Ethereum made them mainstream.
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The gap between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at. Some platforms advertise "zero fees" and earn their margin here instead. The honest comparison across platforms is always the total: what leaves your account versus what lands in your wallet.
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A cryptocurrency designed to track the value of something stable, usually the US dollar. The aim is a coin that moves like money rather than like a market. How well any stablecoin holds its target depends on how it's built and what backs it.
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Locking coins on a proof-of-stake network to help validate transactions, in exchange for rewards paid by the network. Staked coins are typically inaccessible for a period, and rewards vary with network conditions. It applies only to proof-of-stake blockchains.
T
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The short code that identifies a coin on exchanges and price pages: BTC for Bitcoin, ETH for Ethereum, XRP for XRP. Tickers matter practically — some scam tokens imitate real names, and the ticker plus the network is how you confirm you're holding the real one.
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A crypto asset that lives on another blockchain rather than running its own — most tokens are built on Ethereum. "Coin" usually means an asset with its own chain (bitcoin, ether); "token" means one issued on top of someone else's. In practice, the words blur.
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The unique identifier every blockchain transaction receives — a long string you can look up on a block explorer to see the transaction's status, amount and confirmations. If you ever need to prove or trace a transfer, the hash is the receipt.
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A second lock on your account: after your password, you confirm with a code from an app on your phone. Even a stolen password can't get in alone. App-based 2FA is stronger than SMS codes, which can be hijacked. Turn it on before your first purchase, not after.
U
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A token that grants access to something — a service, a platform feature, a network function — rather than representing ownership or money. The category matters legally: regulators treat utility tokens, payment tokens and security tokens under different rules.
V
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A participant in a proof-of-stake network who checks transactions and adds new blocks, with their own staked coins as collateral for honesty. Validators are to proof of stake what miners are to proof of work — the people keeping the ledger honest.
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Virtual Financial Asset: Malta's legal term for crypto assets under its 2018 framework, one of the first comprehensive crypto laws in the world. It preceded the EU-wide MiCA regime, under which providers are now authorised as Crypto-Asset Service Providers (CASPs).
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How much and how fast a price moves. Crypto is more volatile than most traditional assets: double-digit swings in a day happen. Volatility is the honest answer to why crypto can gain and lose value quickly — and why you buy what you can afford to be wrong about.
W
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Where crypto lives. Technically, a wallet stores the keys that control your funds on the blockchain rather than the coins themselves — but in practice, it's the app or device you check your balance in and send from. Custodial or non-custodial, hot or cold: all wallets.
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A loose label for the idea of an internet built on blockchains — where users hold their own assets and identity instead of platforms holding them. Part genuine technology, part marketing umbrella; when you see it, check what's concretely underneath.
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A holder large enough to move a market by trading — an individual, a fund, sometimes an early miner with coins from the beginning. Whale movements are watched closely because a single large sale can push prices; watching them is not the same as predicting them.
Y
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Income earned on crypto holdings — from staking rewards, lending, or DeFi mechanisms. Every source of yield carries its own risk, and in crypto the advertised rate says nothing about the safety of the principal. High yield and high risk arrive together.
Z
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A cryptographic method for proving something is true without revealing the underlying information — proving you're over 18 without showing your birthdate. In crypto, zero-knowledge systems power privacy features and help blockchains process more transactions cheaply.
Licensed by the MFSA. Operating since 2016, used in 100+ countries.
Xcoins is authorised by the Malta Financial Services Authority as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) under MiCA. Rates are for information only and are not an offer or investment advice. Crypto prices are volatile, and the value of what you hold can go down as well as up.
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