💁Glossary

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 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 be also be included as part of an audit). Due to this and other reasons, DeFi is conventionally considered to be more risky than CeFi or traditional investing.

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.

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 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 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 for other purposes such as yield farming. Examples of liquidity tokens include aDAI, yCRV, and yYFI. A liquidity token can be exchanged back

NFT

A non-fungible token (NFT), also known as a nifty, is a special type of cryptographic token which represents something unique; non-fungible tokens are thus not mutually interchangeable by their individual specification. This is in contrast to cryptocurrencies like Zcash, and many network or utility tokens that are fungible in nature.

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.

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.

Slippage

In a 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 at. 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.