The Cardano Glossary

The smallest unit of bitcoin with a value of 0.00000001 BTC.

The individual or group of individuals that created Bitcoin.

a term used to indicate that a particular stake pool has more stake delegated to it than is ideal for the network. Saturation is displayed as a percentage. Once a stake pool reaches 100% saturation, it will offer diminishing rewards.The saturation mechanism was designed to prevent centralization by encouraging delegators to delegate to different stake pools, and operators to set up alternative pools so that they can continue earning maximum rewards. Saturation, therefore, exists to preserve the interests of both ada holders delegating their stake and stake pool operators.

The scaling problem is the limitations of a blockchain's transaction throughout and ability to have fast and low cast transactions.

A scaling solution is a method of enable a system to expand.

A scheme that is designed to dupe people out of cash or crypto.

A scammer is someone that participates in a fraudulent scheme.

a summary of the transaction, which is also needed in the Plutus script to validate the transaction.

A set of solutions built on top of a public blockchain to extend its scalability and efficiency, especially for micro-transactions or actions. Examples include Plasma, TrueBit, Lightning Network and more.

A secondary market is a place where investors or traders can buy and sell different kinds of assets or securities that they own, with others.

An independent agency of the United States federal government, responsible for enforcing federal securities laws, proposing securities rules, and regulating the securities industry, the nation's stock and options exchanges, and other related activities and organizations.

the process of creating liquid, asset-backed securities from pools of illiquid assets.

The term securities refers to a fungible and tradable financial instrument that carries a type of monetary value.

A security token is essentially a digital form of traditional securities.

A security token offering (STO) is a public offering where tokenized digital securities are sold.

A single starting point when deriving keys for a deterministic wallet.

The ambition of the Semantic Web is to enable computers to manipulate information on our behalf.

Search Engine Optimisation

A settlement layer is a layer that essentially provides an anchor for an entire ecosystem.

A cryptographic hash function that generates a 256-bit signature for a text, used in Bitcoin proof-of-work (PoW).

Essentially, a shard is a portion of a blockchain network that has been split into multiple shards, which has its own data.

In the world of cryptocurrencies, sharding can reduce the network congestion as well as increase transactions per second through the creation of new chains

Sharding is a scaling approach that enables splitting of blockchain states into partitions containing states and transaction history, so that each shard can be processed in parallel.

second phase of Cardano development in which network decentralization was delivered.

The act of enthusiastically promoting a cryptocurrency or ICO project.

A coin with no obvious potential value or usage.

A trading technique in which a trader borrows an asset in order to sell it, with the expectation that the price will continue to decline. In the event that the price does decline, the short seller will then buy the asset at this lower price in order to return it to the lender of the asset, making the difference in profit.

A blockchain ledger that runs in parallel to a primary blockchain, where there is a two-way link between the primary chain and sidechain.

A lightweight client to verify blockchain transactions.

Slippage happens when traders have to settle for a different price than what they initially requested due to a price movement.

a fixed period of time within an epoch. Each epoch is divided into numbered slots. Slots that are inhabited by blocks are called active slots.

elected node that has been selected to create a block within the current slot. A random election process occurs based on the proportional stake.

A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to facilitate, verify or enforce a contract on the blockchain without third parties.

A smart contract audit is a security check done by cybersecurity professionals meant to ensure that the on-chain code behind a smart contract is devoid of bugs or security vulnerabilities.

Smart tokens are simply regular tokens that not only transmit value they contain but also all the information needed to execute a transaction simultaneously.

The minimum amount that an initial coin offering (ICO) wants to raise.

A software library is a collection of code that can be referenced while developing other executable programs.

The programming language used by Ethereum for developing smart contracts.

Spyware is a malware that records all of the activities on an electronic device.

A cryptocurrency with extremely low volatility, sometimes used as a means of portfolio diversification. Examples include gold-backed cryptocurrency or fiat-pegged cryptocurrency.

a reliable block-producing server node that holds the combined stake of various stakeholders in a single entity, or pool.

Participation in a proof-of-stake (PoS) system to put your tokens in to serve as a validator to the blockchain and receive rewards.

Staking Pools allows users to combine their resources in order to increase their chances of earning rewards. This mechanism offers more staking power to the network to verify and validate new blocks.

A stop-loss order in trading allows investors to determine the lowest price at which they are willing to sell an asset and trigger an automatic sell order when and if this price is reached.

A store of value is an asset, commodity or currency that can be saved, retrieved as well as exchanged in the future without it losing any value.

A supercomputer is a superior version of a general-purpose computer, which has a significantly increased capacity and processing power.

Supply and demand are the levels in an economy that determine the market's willingness to buy or sell assets or services, respectively.

A supply chain is the collection of steps that a product or service needs to go through before reaching the final customer.

A supply chain attack is a tactic used by hackers to compromise third-party suppliers to major corporations, governments and organizations to gain valuable information.

The ticker of a cryptocurrency; for example, Bitcoin's symbol is BTC.