Cryptocurrencies

Instead of your local bank holding your money, restricting who you can and can’t transfer it to and charging you fees for using their services, in a decentralised environment, you hold your funds in a secure digital wallet and can send money from anywhere in the world to anyone in the world almost instantly, just by having access to an internet connection. 

A brokerage is an online service that allows users to buy and sell assets such as stocks, shares or cryptocurrencies with their local currency. Brokerages charge users a fee for using their platform and can offer additional services such as staking and liquidity pools.

A term similar to Bitcoin miners, a blockchain validator is someone who is responsible for verifying transactions on a blockchain. Once these transactions have been verified or ‘validated’, they are then added along with the new block to the chain. 

ERC-20 tokens run on top of the Ethereum blockchain alongside its native currency – ‘Ether’ and can act similarly as either a currency or a representation of other tokens of value such as shares of a company, loyalty points or more.

The ERC-20 token standard is a set of rules and guidelines that dictate the fundamental functions token-creating smart contracts must have.

Bitcoin’s price is linked directly to supply and demand, and events that impact the economy on a national and global level impact people’s need to buy or own (hodl) the cryptocurrency.

Much like an upgrade to your operating system on your smartphone or laptop, Ethereum’s Consensus Layer is a series of upcoming upgrades to Ethereum’s blockchain that aims to improve its speed and capacity for transactions, reduce their cost and increase overall security.

Bitcoin XT was a fork from Bitcoin Core. Proposed in BIP 101 and launched in August 2015, the split from the Bitcoin community was due to disagreements on rule changes with some of Bitcoin Core’s senior developers.

A BTC futures contract is an agreement between a buyer and seller to buy and sell BTC at an agreed price at a future date. The agreement (contract) is the traded commodity, not the actual underlying asset (Bitcoin). It gives investors exposure to BTC without having to hold actual cryptocurrency.

Every cryptocurrency transaction is recorded on a blockchain, but when exactly these transactions are recorded depends whether transactions happen on-chain or off-chain.

A Bitcoin flash crash is when the price of Bitcoin drops dramatically and then returns to its previous levels very quickly. Flash crashes are not unique to Bitcoin and can happen for other cryptocurrencies, as well as stocks.

Ethereum Classic is the original version of the Ethereum blockchain with ETC as its native token.