Centralized exchanges
A trading venue can move balances instantly in its own ledger while customers depend on its custody and withdrawal systems.
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THE ATLAS
Every part has a purpose.
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64 topics
Decentralized exchanges
A DEX settles exchanges through blockchain rules, but its market design, interfaces and administrative controls still matter.
Order books and market depth
An order book collects offers to buy and sell. Execution depends on the available quantities at each price.
Automated market makers
A liquidity pool quotes exchanges from its reserves and a pricing rule instead of waiting for a matching order.
Price impact and slippage
Your trade moves the price; the world can also change between a quote and execution. These are different effects.
Liquidity providers
LPs lend neither a fixed quantity nor a guaranteed return: they hold a claim on inventory that traders continually reshape.
LP inventory and divergence loss
Divergence loss compares a pool position with holding its original assets. It is a benchmark difference, not a separate fee.
Yield farming and incentives
A displayed yield can combine fees, interest and token subsidies. Trace each source before combining the numbers.
APR, APY and net return
Annual rates describe a convention. Compounding, fees, changing token prices and losses determine what a position actually returns.
Staking and validator rewards
Consensus staking places assets at risk to support validation. Its rewards are different from interest paid by a borrower.
Delegated staking and pools
Delegation separates capital from some operational duties. The exact custody, voting and penalty boundaries depend on the network and service.
Liquid staking tokens
A transferable token represents a staking position through additional accounting and redemption rules. Transferability does not make the underlying stake instantly withdrawable.
Restaking
Restaking commits already staked or represented capital to additional services, adding new obligations and potential penalties.
DeFi lending
Lenders supply assets that borrowers can use. Their return comes primarily from borrower interest, with liquidity and loss risks along the way.
Borrowing against collateral
Borrowing creates an obligation in the borrowed asset. Collateral provides a recovery path if the position breaches its rules.
Collateral and borrowing capacity
Collateral is a recovery asset. Its quantity, market value, liquidity and permitted use all affect how much credit it can support.
Liquidation and bad debt
Liquidation repays debt by transferring collateral. It can begin before insolvency, and it does not guarantee complete recovery.
Leverage and recursive borrowing
Leverage creates exposure larger than the equity supporting it. Small price changes can then produce much larger changes in that equity.
Utilization and interest rates
A pool’s rates coordinate borrowers and suppliers. They change with demand, available liquidity and governance parameters.
Oracles and outside information
An oracle brings an external assertion into a blockchain. Consensus over the assertion does not make the outside fact automatically true.
Transaction ordering and MEV
The ability to choose transaction inclusion and order can create value beyond ordinary fees, with different effects on users.
Governance and control
A protocol’s rules include who can change the rules. Votes, software adoption and administrative keys are different sources of authority.
Bridges and wrapped claims
A bridge makes one system act on events from another. Wrapped assets often depend on locked backing and the bridge’s verification rules.
Interoperability and cross-chain messages
Connecting chains requires agreement about messages, identity and finality, not just compatible addresses.
Layer-two networks
A layer two executes activity away from a base chain while relying on that base layer for defined parts of security and settlement.
Optimistic rollups
Optimistic rollups accept proposed state changes subject to a dispute process that can demonstrate incorrect execution.
Validity proofs and rollups
A validity rollup proves that an offchain state transition follows specified rules before the settlement contract accepts it.
Data availability
A compact commitment can identify data without supplying it. Verification and independent recovery require the necessary data to be obtainable.
Derivatives and margin
A derivative creates a payoff linked to an underlying reference. Exposure, ownership and collateral are separate quantities.
Perpetual futures and funding
Perpetual contracts have no scheduled expiry. Funding payments encourage their trading price to stay near a reference market.
How crypto systems fail
Failures occur at distinct layers: keys, contracts, economic assumptions, operators and connections. A useful risk map follows the assets through each.
How to read a protocol
Turn a protocol description into a map of assets, obligations, authorities and failure paths before interpreting its headline metrics.
Cryptographic hashes
A hash turns data into a compact fingerprint. It helps expose changes, but it does not make the data true, secret or permanent.
Digital signatures
A signature lets a network check that an instruction was authorized by a key, without receiving that secret key.
Private keys, public keys and addresses
Keys create spending authority. Addresses identify destinations or spending conditions. They are related objects, not interchangeable names for a wallet.
Seed phrases and recovery
A recovery phrase can recreate many wallet keys. It is powerful secret material, and its compatibility depends on the wallet’s actual recovery scheme.
What a wallet actually does
A wallet connects human intent to cryptographic authorization and network state. The assets remain recorded by the network, not inside the app.
Custody and control
Custody asks who can authorize transfers and what claim you have if that party fails. A visible account balance does not answer either question by itself.
Multisig and shared authorization
A threshold of approvals can distribute control. Its resilience depends on independent signers, recoverable information and the exact account implementation.
A transaction from intent to settlement
A transaction is a proposed state change. Signing, broadcasting, inclusion, execution and finality are separate stages with different failure modes.
Nodes and independent verification
Nodes run the rules, exchange information and reconstruct network state. Running a node is different from producing blocks or earning staking rewards.
Blocks and ordered execution
A block packages an ordered set of transactions with commitments that let other nodes verify it. Its producer proposes a result; the network still checks it.
What a blockchain adds
A blockchain joins a shared history, verifiable state transitions and a rule for choosing between competing histories. The chain of hashes is only one component.
Proof of work
Proof of work makes block production a costly search. In Bitcoin, nodes choose the valid chain with the most accumulated work, not simply the most blocks.
Mining, pools and block rewards
Mining combines transaction selection, a proof-of-work search and an economic business. A pool smooths payouts while introducing coordination and operator dependencies.
Proof of stake
Proof of stake assigns consensus influence using committed assets and protocol rules. Rewards compensate participation; penalties make certain failures costly.
Validators and their duties
A validator participates in consensus under a specific protocol. The operator, signing key, withdrawal authority and beneficial owner may be different parties.
Finality and confirmations
Finality describes the strength of settlement under a network’s assumptions. A transaction can be visible, included and successful before it is considered final.
Forks, reorganizations and rule changes
“Fork” can mean a temporary competing history, a change in consensus rules or a lasting network split. Keeping those meanings separate avoids confusion.
Bitcoin as a complete system
Bitcoin combines a native asset, unspent-output accounting, proof of work and independent validation. Its historic design paper explains the starting idea; current rules add implementation detail.
UTXOs and change outputs
An unspent transaction output is a discrete piece of spendable value with conditions attached. A Bitcoin transaction consumes whole outputs and creates new ones.
Ethereum and account-based systems
Ethereum maintains accounts and shared contract state, with ETH paying for execution and supporting consensus. Tokens built on it add their own rules.
Smart contracts and programmable obligations
A smart contract is code and state enforced through a network’s execution rules. It can automate an obligation without guaranteeing that the obligation is sensible.
Gas, fees and failed execution
Gas measures execution resources. A gas price converts those units into an ETH fee; it is separate from the amount of value a transaction transfers.
Token standards and allowances
A token standard defines an interface other software can recognize. It does not define the token’s economic value, backing or every administrative permission.
Token supply, incentives and value
Tokenomics describes issuance, allocation and economic incentives. A supply schedule is an accounting rule; it is not a complete explanation of demand or price.
Stablecoins and the peg
A stablecoin targets a reference value. The target, market price, backing assets and redemption rights are four separate things.
Fiat-backed stablecoins
An issuer-backed token connects onchain transfers to offchain reserves and redemption procedures. The claim is only as useful as those connections.
Crypto-backed stablecoins
Collateralized issuance creates a token alongside a debt position. Extra collateral absorbs some price movement, while oracles and liquidation try to limit deficits.
Algorithmic stablecoins and reflexive backing
An algorithm can adjust supply or exchange tokens. It cannot create outside purchasing power by rule alone when confidence and market liquidity disappear.
NFTs: unique tokens, separate rights
An NFT tracks a distinct token identifier. The token, its metadata, the displayed media and any rights granted to the holder are separate layers.
Tokenization and offchain claims
Tokenization represents an asset or right with a digital token. The representation can improve coordination while adding a boundary between ledger state and the underlying asset.
Privacy and public ledgers
A pseudonymous address is not the same as anonymity. Ledger data, network metadata and information held by services can combine into a detailed picture.
Zero-knowledge proofs
A zero-knowledge proof can establish that a precise statement holds without revealing the secret witness used to prove it. The statement and public inputs can still be visible.
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