The language of crypto & payments.

Exchange-traded fund

A pooled investment fund whose shares trade on an exchange, giving investors an interest in the portfolio under the fund’s governing structure.

Also known as ETF

Failover

The process of shifting a service or workload to an alternative component when its primary component fails or is unavailable.

Fiat currency

Government-issued money, such as the euro or US dollar, whose monetary framework is not based on a promise to redeem each unit for a fixed commodity quantity.

Also known as fiat money

Gas fee

A fee for the computational resources used by a transaction on a network that measures execution work in gas.

Also known as gas fees

GraphQL

A query language, type system and execution model through which clients request fields and operations exposed by an application service.

Hardware wallet

A physical device designed to protect cryptographic signing material and authorize blockchain transactions without exposing keys to an ordinary host application.

Also known as hardware wallets

Hedging

Taking a position or using an arrangement intended to offset exposure to an identified financial risk, such as an adverse price or exchange-rate change.

HIPAA

The US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, whose framework includes rules for specified health information, administrative transactions and covered entities.

Also known as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

HTTP caching

The controlled storage and reuse of HTTP responses according to freshness, validation and cache-control rules.

Idempotency

A property of an operation in which repeating it has the same intended effect as performing it once.

Also known as idempotence

Installment payment

One payment in a series used to pay an agreed total over time, under a schedule that defines amounts, dates and other applicable terms.

Also known as installments, payment installment

Invoice

A commercial document stating what a seller charges a buyer, including the relevant goods or services, amount and payment details.

Also known as invoicing

IOLTA

Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts: programs that direct interest from qualifying pooled lawyer trust accounts to designated legal-services or access-to-justice purposes.

Also known as Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts

ISO/IEC 27001

An international standard specifying requirements for an information security management system, commonly abbreviated ISMS.

Also known as ISO 27001

Key management

The policies and processes used to generate, protect, use, back up, recover, replace and retire cryptographic keys and related authorization material.

Also known as cryptographic key management

Know your customer

Processes used to establish and understand a customer’s identity, relevant account facts and authority to act, within the applicable relationship and regulatory framework.

Also known as KYC

Layer 2

A scaling system built above a base blockchain that derives specified security guarantees from that base layer while handling some activity separately.

Also known as L2

Lightning Network

A network of payment channels that supports off-chain bitcoin payments, with channel funding and closure connected to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Also known as Lightning

Micropayment

A payment of a small amount, often used for an individual item, brief usage or a frequent low-value interaction; there is no universal monetary cutoff.

Also known as microtransaction, micropayments, microtransactions

Milestone payment

A payment linked to the completion or acceptance of a defined project stage or performance event rather than solely to the passage of time.

Also known as milestone billing

Multi-party computation

A family of cryptographic techniques that lets multiple participants compute a result while protecting their private inputs under a defined security model.

Also known as MPC

Multi-signature wallet

An account or spending arrangement that requires a specified threshold of distinct signing authorities to approve an action.

Also known as multisig wallet

Net payment terms

Commercial terms that define when an invoice’s full amount becomes due, commonly expressed as a number of days from an agreed starting point.

Also known as net terms

Non-fungible token

A blockchain token identified individually rather than treated as interchangeable with every other token of the same type.

Also known as NFT, NFTs