60 ai and crypto terms from the wire, each explained in a sentence or two of plain english. bookmark it, or tap a term in any issue to land here.
updated oct 18, 2026 · new terms are added as they show up in issues.
profit after the company strips out costs it calls one-off or non-cash, like stock-based pay. it's not the same as net income under accounting rules, so always ask what was adjusted.
an ai model wired to tools so it can take actions, not just answer: browse, run code, call apis or move money. the risk is that it acts outside the limits you meant to give it.
capital expenditure on ai infrastructure: data centers, chips, power and networking. when it's funded with debt, rising interest rates make the payback math harder.
the minimum price per unit of gas that every ethereum transaction in a block must pay. the protocol sets it from how full the previous block was, and it's burned, not paid to anyone.
see: what is gwei?
one hundredth of a percentage point. a 25bp rate hike moves a rate from, say, 4.00% to 4.25%.
companies that run specialized computers to secure bitcoin and earn new coins plus fees. many listed miners now also rent their power and data centers to ai companies, so their stocks trade on both bitcoin and ai.
see: #002: miners −10.7% · bitcoin
a chunk of data that layer 2 rollups attach to ethereum blocks, added by eip-4844 in march 2024. blobs are priced in their own fee market and deleted after about 18 days, which makes them far cheaper than storing data permanently.
see: what is gwei?
a free website, like mempool.space for bitcoin or etherscan for ethereum, that shows every transaction, address and balance on a blockchain. it's how you check a headline against the chain itself.
an automatic trading halt an exchange triggers when an index falls by a set amount in one day. it gives the market time to pause before trading resumes.
a legally binding request, similar to a subpoena, that agencies like the us federal trade commission use to force a company to hand over documents or answer questions during an investigation.
a free cme group tool that turns fed funds futures prices into the market's implied odds of the fed raising, holding or cutting rates at each meeting.
the processing power, mostly gpus in data centers, needed to train and run ai models. ai labs buy it from clouds or build it themselves, often with multi-year contracts.
cpi without food and energy, the two most volatile categories. the fed watches it closely because it shows whether inflation is broad-based or just an oil spike.
see: #001: core 2.6%
the average price holders paid for an asset. when bitcoin trades below the average cost of spot etf buyers, many of them are underwater, which can turn that level into resistance.
the us bureau of labor statistics' monthly measure of what consumers pay for a basket of goods and services. it's the headline inflation number, and a hot print raises the odds of higher rates, which usually hits bitcoin.
see: #001: cpi hit 3.7% · macro
a listed company whose main strategy is holding bitcoin or other crypto on its balance sheet, like strategy (formerly microstrategy) or metaplanet. its stock trades largely as a proxy for the coins it holds.
who actually holds the private keys to crypto. with a custodian (an exchange, a bank, an etf's custodian) a third party holds them; with self-custody, you do.
decentralized finance: lending, trading and other financial apps that run on smart contracts instead of banks or brokers. you use them from your own wallet.
the august 2021 ethereum upgrade that split fees into a protocol-set base fee, which is burned, and an optional tip to the validator. it made fees more predictable.
see: what is gwei?
the net money going into (inflows) or out of (outflows) exchange-traded funds on a given day or week. for spot bitcoin and ether etfs, it's one of the cleanest daily reads on institutional demand.
a token's price times its maximum supply, including tokens not yet unlocked. a big gap between fdv and market cap means a lot of future supply could hit the market.
the federal open market committee, the 12-member fed body that sets us interest rates. it meets eight times a year, and crypto often moves hardest around its decisions.
see: macro
a periodic payment between long and short traders on perpetual futures that keeps the perp price near spot. positive funding means longs pay shorts, a sign the market is crowded long.
contracts to buy or sell an asset at a set price later. traders use them to bet on price moves with leverage or to hedge, and bitcoin futures trade on both cme and crypto exchanges.
the unit that measures how much computation an ethereum transaction uses. a plain eth transfer uses 21,000 gas; your fee is gas used times the gas price in gwei.
see: what is gwei? · ethereum
one-billionth of an eth (0.000000001 eth, or 10^-9). it's the unit ethereum gas prices are quoted in, and the "gwei" in gweiwire.
what a bitcoin miner earns per unit of computing power per day, usually quoted in dollars per petahash per day. it falls when bitcoin's price or fees drop or when more miners compete.
the view that central banks will keep interest rates high for an extended period rather than cutting soon. it's usually bad for risk assets like tech stocks and crypto.
when a stock is removed from an index like msci's. funds that passively track the index must then sell it, which can mean forced selling regardless of the company's news.
running a trained ai model to get an answer, as opposed to training it. every chatgpt reply or agent action is inference, and it's where most ongoing compute costs land.
see: ai
a private company's first sale of shares to the public, after which its stock trades on an exchange. the ipo price sets the company's first public valuation.
a network that runs on top of ethereum, executes transactions off the main chain and posts the results back. arbitrum, optimism and base are examples; fees are usually a fraction of mainnet's.
see: what is gwei? · ethereum
trading with borrowed money so a small deposit controls a bigger position. 10x leverage turns a 1% move into a 10% gain or loss, and a 10% move the wrong way can wipe the position out.
when an exchange or lending protocol force-closes a leveraged position because the trader's collateral no longer covers losses. big price moves trigger waves of them, which push prices further.
see: #003: ~$948m liquidated · markets
an ai model trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language, like gpt, claude or gemini. it's the engine inside chatbots and most ai agents.
see: ai
a long position profits if the price rises; a short profits if it falls. "longs got liquidated" means traders betting on a rise were forced out.
month-over-month and year-over-year: how much a number changed versus last month and versus the same month a year earlier. inflation headlines usually quote y/y; traders react to m/m.
an open standard that lets ai assistants like claude or codex plug into outside tools and data, such as a crypto analytics service, and call them on your behalf. each call can still cost money on the tool's side.
profit that block builders and bots can make by reordering, inserting or censoring transactions, for example sandwiching your swap. "mev protection" sends your transaction privately so bots can't front-run it.
a cloud company built mainly to rent gpus for ai, like coreweave, rather than a general cloud like aws. several are former bitcoin miners, and many fund their buildout with debt.
the total value of futures or options contracts that are still open. rising open interest with rising prices means new money and new leverage are coming in.
futures with no expiry date, the most traded crypto derivative. a funding rate paid between longs and shorts keeps their price tied to spot.
encryption and signature schemes designed to survive attacks from large quantum computers. bitcoin's current signatures could in theory be broken by such machines, which don't exist yet, so migration plans are a long-running debate.
the bls's monthly measure of prices received by us producers, often read as an early signal for consumer inflation. it comes out around the same week as cpi.
see: #003: ppi printed 1.3% · macro
the optional extra you pay per unit of gas on ethereum to get your transaction picked up faster. it goes to the validator, unlike the base fee, which is burned.
see: what is gwei?
the market-implied probability that the fed raises rates at its next meeting, usually read from cme fedwatch. jumps in hike odds tend to pull bitcoin and tech stocks down.
the 12 or 24 words that can restore a crypto wallet. whoever sees it controls the funds, so it should never be typed into a website or shared with anyone.
the most common type of layer 2. it bundles many transactions, posts their data to ethereum and relies on ethereum for security, so users split one mainnet fee.
see: what is gwei?
holding your own crypto keys in a wallet you control, instead of leaving coins on an exchange. no one can freeze your funds, but no one can recover them if you lose the keys either.
an exchange-traded fund that holds the actual asset, like bitcoin or ether, rather than futures. it lets people buy crypto exposure in a normal brokerage account.
see: bitcoin
a token designed to hold a steady value, usually $1, backed by cash and short-term treasuries. usdt and usdc are the biggest; they're the main way money moves around crypto.
see: crypto
the us government's bitcoin reserve, set up by a march 2025 executive order and funded with bitcoin forfeited in criminal and civil cases. the order only allows budget-neutral ways to add more.
a copy of a blockchain used for testing, like ethereum's sepolia. its coins have no market value, so developers can deploy and break things for free.
permission you give a smart contract to spend tokens from your wallet, often for an unlimited amount. old approvals stay live until you revoke them, which is how many wallet drains happen.
the chunks of text, roughly three-quarters of a word each, that ai models read and write. api prices are quoted per million input and output tokens.
the dollar value of crypto deposited in a defi protocol's smart contracts. it's a rough gauge of how much a protocol is used, but it moves with token prices, not just with deposits.
what a company is worth, based on the price of its latest funding round or its share price times shares outstanding. private ai valuations get repriced when public investors set the ipo price.
see: #004: $2t to ~$1.5t
the smallest unit of ether: one eth is 10^18 wei. it's named after cryptographer wei dai, and a billion wei make one gwei.
see: what is gwei?
a wallet or holder with enough coins to move a market, or at least the headlines. when an old whale wallet moves, it can mean a sale is coming, or just that the owner is reorganizing their own addresses.
an open payment standard that revives the web's "402 payment required" status code so apps and ai agents can pay per request in stablecoins. most payments so far are tiny, often under 10 cents.
see: #002: agent payments
the full explainer behind the name: what is gwei? ethereum gas fees explained. topic hubs: bitcoin · ethereum · ai · macro · markets. every issue: the archive.