Atomic settlement
A settlement arrangement in which every leg of a transaction completes together or none completes at all, enforced by the ledger rather than by a chain of intermediary promises.
Concepts and explainers
The reference layer. Each entry sets out what a term means, how it is measured, where the measurement breaks down, and what is still argued about, with the date the desk last checked it.
Every entry, A to Z
Currency substitution
The displacement of a domestic currency by a foreign one in the store-of-value, unit-of-account and payment functions, now increasingly mediated by dollar-referenced stablecoins rather than by physical cash or bank deposits.
Delivery versus payment
A securities settlement mechanism that links the transfer of an asset to the transfer of its cash consideration so that neither can complete without the other.
Depegging
One word covers two unrelated events: a venue print 35 cents below a dollar while the issuer's redemption channel never closed, and a token that fell to nothing because there was never anything behind it.
E-money tokens and asset-referenced tokens
One of MiCA's two categories carries a par redemption right and 46 notified white papers; the other carries redemption at market value and, on ESMA's register in July 2026, not one authorised issuer.
Governance token voting concentration
Delegated voting power in the largest onchain protocols is distributed with Gini coefficients above 0.94, and in some cases a single delegate can carry a proposal alone, which makes the binding constraint on a decision arithmetic rather than persuasion.
Maximal extractable value
Whoever decides the order of transactions in a block holds an option on every trade inside it, and that option is now auctioned to specialist builders and paid through to the validator who proposes the block.
Monetary sovereignty
A state's capacity to determine the unit of account used in its economy and to control the supply and price of the settlement asset in which domestic obligations are discharged.
Net asset value and onchain pricing
A tokenized fund carries two prices at once, the administrator's struck valuation and whatever the token changes hands at in between, and most design arguments in the sector are about which of the two governs a subscription, a redemption or a margin call.
Oracle dependency
A contract can only act on facts someone has written onto the chain for it, so whoever reports a price, a net asset value or a reserve balance holds an unpriced position in every market that reads the report.
Payment corridor economics
The cost structure of moving value between two specific countries, determined by liquidity prefunding, foreign exchange margin, compliance overhead and the density of cash-in and cash-out networks at each end.
Permissioned transfer
A token design in which each transfer is validated against identity and eligibility rules at the moment of execution, so that an otherwise valid transaction fails if the recipient is not permitted to hold the asset.
Prediction market prices as probabilities
A binary contract paying $1 on an outcome trades at the market's discounted expectation of it, which equals the average belief of traders only under assumptions about risk appetite, funding cost and resolution certainty that fail at the tails.
Primary issuance onchain
A bond or fund share brought into existence as a ledger entry the investor already holds, rather than printed into a depository and reconciled afterwards; the European evidence is that it lowers the yield an issuer pays without lowering the fees.
Protocol revenue and value accrual
Between the fee a user pays and any income a token holder receives sit liquidity providers, node operators, loss buffers and a governance vote that can redirect the whole flow, which is why gross fees and holder income differ by an order of magnitude.
Redemption at par
The issuer's promise to convert one token into one unit of currency binds only those counterparties with a direct account, a minimum ticket size and the patience to sit through the settlement window.
Reserve attestation
An accountant's report on an issuer's assertion about the assets backing its outstanding liabilities at a point in time, narrower in scope than an audit of financial statements, and often mistaken for one.
Reserve composition
Two supervisors reading the same balance sheet disagree about what safety means: Brussels pushes at least 30% of the backing into commercial bank deposits, while Washington's preferred safe harbour asks for 10%.
Secondary liquidity for tokenized assets
The capacity to sell to another investor rather than back to the issuer, which turns less on whether a venue is open at three in the morning than on whether anyone has an obligation to quote a price at that hour.
Seigniorage and float income
Circle earned $653m on the USDC reserve in the March 2026 quarter and paid $407m of that away to the firms whose customers hold the balances, which is the clearest published account of where this rent actually settles.
Settlement finality
Statute fixes the instant at which a transfer stops being reversible; consensus only makes reversal expensive, and the distance between those two ideas is where insolvency law, collateral eligibility and central bank access get decided.
Staking economics and slashing
Validator income is protocol issuance plus priority fees and ordering revenue, less operating cost; the penalty schedule is deliberately mild for isolated error and severe for correlated failure, so what it prices is independence rather than uptime.
Tokenized collateral
Collateral whose ownership or control is recorded on a shared ledger so that it can be pledged, substituted or transferred without moving the underlying security through settlement.
Total value locked
The headline size measure for onchain protocols, and the one most sensitive to bookkeeping: wrapping, restaking and borrowing can each count the same deposited dollar again, and a price fall shrinks the number without anyone withdrawing.
Transfer agent and register of record
Which entry decides who legally owns a security is a question of law rather than of format, and in every arrangement a regulator has so far accepted the answer is a licensed agent that happens to keep its book on a chain.
Travel rule
Brussels attaches an identity file to a crypto transfer of any size while Washington still lets $2,999 move unnamed, and neither rule reaches the counterparty that never obtained a licence.
No entry matches every filter at once. Clear one to widen the view.
By desk
The same entries, grouped by the coverage area they belong to.
Market design
- Atomic settlement
- Delivery versus payment
- Depegging
- Maximal extractable value
- Net asset value and onchain pricing
- Payment corridor economics
- Permissioned transfer
- Prediction market prices as probabilities
- Primary issuance onchain
- Redemption at par
- Secondary liquidity for tokenized assets
- Settlement finality
- Tokenized collateral
- Total value locked