Meme Coins, DeFi, and Other Crypto Buzzwords You Need To Know By Now

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You might get away with not knowing much about cryptocurrency in 2021, but it’s a new year, and with the crypto market now worth $ 3 trillion, you have no excuse not to. not become literate in crypto. Here are some of the biggest buzzwords of the year you should know – and some not so new to make this brave new money world less … well, cryptic.

Block chain

While this is nothing new, you need to know what it means if you are to have any chance of understanding crypto. A blockchain is a decentralized, encrypted ledger that records all cryptocurrency transactions across the world. More specifically, it is a shared database in which blocks of data (such as account balances and transactions) are chained in chronological order. On a blockchain, digital information is permanently recorded and cannot be changed. (Ouch.)

Altcoin

If Bitcoin is the grandfather of crypto, altcoin is all of its “alternate coins” or alternate versions. The most important are: Ethereum, Solana and Dogecoin.

Stablecoins

A subset of altcoin, stablecoins offer the benefits of crypto with more stability. (Crypto prices are notoriously volatile – Bitcoin stocks are known to lose $ 9,000 in value overnight.) Designed to be relatively stable in price, stablecoins (like Tether, USD Coin, and Binance) peg their value to real-world assets – commodities like gold or other currencies, like the US dollar or the euro.

Even corners

If anyone had told you ten years ago that new forms of currency inspired by memes and online jokes (like “doge”, a misspelling of “dog” that first appeared in a animated web series before it was popularized on Reddit) would be available for trading on the stock exchange, would you have believed them? Yes, me neither. Yet here we are.

Dogecoin

(DOHJ-coin): This is the most vivid example of the meme coins mentioned above. This cryptocurrency was first coined in 2013 as a joke to satire the wild and (at the time) seemingly baseless popularity of crypto. It gained popularity after being touted by Elon Musk.

Web 3.0 / Web3

Essentially, the third iteration of the Internet. While Web 1.0 saw the launch of the original “World Wide Web” with static sites, no ads, and dial-up access, and Web 2.0 ushered in the rise of the behemoths of technology (Amazon, Google) and generated content by users (blogs, podcasts, and social media), then Web 3.0 envisions the evolution of the Web into a decentralized network built on peer-to-peer connections, where individuals, in theory, will retain more ownership of their digital property. (The main features of Web3 include 3D graphics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and semantic metadata.)

Crypto wallet

A place to store your private “keys” or passwords that give you access to the blockchain. These can be either “hot wallets” meaning virtual (like the Coinbase Wallet mobile app) or “cold wallets” meaning tangible material coins like Ledger. Either way, if you want to trade crypto this is a must have.

Challenge

Sometimes referred to as “the Wild West of finance,” decentralized finance is the largely unregulated industry of automated financial instruments that allows crypto users to lend, borrow, speculate through derivatives, and trade crypto directly via a blockchain, without the need for brokerage, banks or other intermediaries.

TVN

Non-fungible tokens allow buyers to own collectible digital art, music or games, among other assets that are far more fun than Bank of America stocks. Think of it as a trendy crypto; it’s not just for fintech geeks, it’s for investors who might want to spend $ 208,000 on an epic LeBron James dunk – that is, digitally.

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