The crypto glossary that gets your money
Clear definitions, with no jargon, written by the Bitso team. From Bitcoin to DeFi, a space for Latin America to understand its money.
Altcoin
Any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. The term comes from 'alternative coin' and covers everything from Ethereum to thousands of smaller projects.
Altseason
The phase of the crypto cycle in which altcoins rise faster than Bitcoin and capital rotates massively into higher-risk assets in search of bigger returns.
ATH
The highest price an asset has ever reached, the strongest psychological reference point on any chart.
Bear market
A sustained period of falling prices of more than 20% from highs, with dominant pessimism and risk-off behavior; in crypto, drops of 70-85% in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency, a form of decentralized digital money that doesn't depend on any bank or government.
Bitcoin dominance
The percentage of the total crypto market's value that belongs to Bitcoin, used as a gauge of where capital is flowing within the ecosystem.
Blockchain
A distributed database chained together in blocks that records transactions permanently, publicly, and immutably, with no need for a central authority.
Bull market
A sustained period of rising prices, widespread optimism, and risk appetite, in which highs are broken and new capital keeps flowing in without pause.
CBDC
The digital version of a country's official currency, issued and controlled directly by its central bank: state money with new technology, not a cryptocurrency.
Cold wallet
A device or crypto storage method that keeps private keys completely disconnected from the internet, eliminating remote attack vectors.
Crypto exchange
A platform that lets you buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies, either in centralized form, like Bitso, or decentralized form, like a DEX.
Crypto wallet
A crypto wallet is an application or device that stores the cryptographic keys that give you access to and control over your cryptocurrency on the blockchain.
Cryptocurrency
A digital asset that uses cryptography to secure transactions and control the issuance of new units, operating in a decentralized way without banks or governments.
Cryptography
The discipline that protects information using mathematics: it turns readable data into codes that are unreadable to anyone without the key.
DAO
A DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is a community governed by rules written into smart contracts and token-based voting, with no board or central management.
dApp
A dApp (decentralized application) is a program whose logic runs on smart contracts on a blockchain, instead of on a company's servers.
DeFi
DeFi (decentralized finance) is the ecosystem of financial protocols that run on public blockchains through smart contracts: lending, borrowing, trading, and generating yield without banks or intermediaries, with code as the only employee.
DEX
A DEX (decentralized exchange) is a crypto trading platform that runs on smart contracts on a blockchain, with no intermediary company.
Ethereum
A programmable blockchain network that lets you build decentralized applications, smart contracts, and digital assets on top of its infrastructure.
FOMO
Fear of missing out on an opportunity: the impulse to buy an asset just because it's rising and everyone else seems to be making money but you.
Fundamental analysis
An assessment of what an asset is really worth by studying what's behind the price: the technology, the team, adoption, token economics, and context.
Halving
The Bitcoin halving is an event programmed into the code that cuts the reward miners receive for validating blocks in half, occurring roughly every four years.
HODL
The most famous term in crypto culture: it means holding your assets for the long term without selling them, no matter how the market rises or falls.
ICO
A fundraising mechanism in which a crypto project sells its tokens to the public before launching its product, to raise capital directly and without intermediaries.
Japanese candlesticks
The standard way to chart prices in trading, where each candle summarizes the open, close, high, and low of a period.
Liquidity pool
A shared deposit of two cryptocurrencies locked in a smart contract that anyone can trade against, swapping one for the other without needing to find a counterparty.
MACD
A technical indicator that measures the strength and direction of a trend's momentum by comparing two moving averages of price.
Market cap
The total value of all units of a cryptocurrency in circulation, calculated by multiplying the current price by the circulating supply.
Memecoin
A cryptocurrency born from an internet meme or cultural phenomenon, usually with little technical utility and a price driven mainly by community and market sentiment.
Mempool
The mempool (memory pool) is a blockchain's waiting room: the space where sent transactions wait for a miner or validator to include them in a block.
NFT
A unique, one-of-a-kind token recorded on a blockchain that certifies ownership of a digital or physical asset.
P2P
A network architecture where participants connect directly to each other, with no server or central authority, on which Bitcoin was built.
Ponzi scheme
A fraud that pays returns to earlier investors with money from new investors, with no real investment behind it.
Private key
The secret cryptographic code that controls your cryptocurrency: whoever holds it can sign transactions and move the funds. It's not a recoverable password; it is ownership itself.
Proof of Stake
Proof of Stake (PoS) is a consensus mechanism in which validators lock up cryptocurrency as collateral to earn the right to validate transactions and create blocks.
Proof of Work
Proof of Work (PoW) is Bitcoin's original consensus mechanism: miners compete to solve a mathematical problem that requires real energy, and the winner validates the next block in exchange for a reward.
Pump and dump
Market manipulation in which a group artificially inflates an asset's price through coordinated buying and misleading promotion, then sells at the peak.
Rug pull
A crypto scam in which a project's creators suddenly abandon it and walk away with all the investors' funds, leaving the token worthless.
Satoshi
The smallest unit of Bitcoin, equal to 0.00000001 BTC (one hundred-millionth), named after its anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Seed phrase
A list of 12 or 24 words that backs up your entire wallet: with it, you can regenerate all your private keys and recover your funds on any device.
Slippage
The difference between the price you expected when placing an order and the actual price at which it executed, which grows when liquidity is scarce, volatility is high, or the order is too large for the market.
Stablecoin
A cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value, usually pegged to a fiat currency like the US dollar, to a commodity, or through algorithms.
Stop loss
An order that automatically sells an asset once its price falls to the level you set.
Support and resistance
Support is a price zone where declines tend to stall because demand shows up, and resistance is a zone where rallies stop because supply dominates.
Take profit
An order that automatically closes your position once the price reaches the profit target you set.
Technical analysis
The study of price and volume on charts to identify trends and likely scenarios, without evaluating the asset's fundamentals.
Token
A digital asset that lives on another network's blockchain instead of having its own chain, and that can represent almost anything: voting rights, access to a service, a share in a pool, or ownership of a real-world asset.
Tokenization
The process of representing a real-world asset, such as real estate, gold, debt, or a work of art, as tokens on a blockchain, making it divisible, transferable in minutes, and paperwork-free to register.
USDC
A stablecoin that maintains a 1:1 peg to the US dollar, issued by Circle and backed by reserves verified monthly.
USDT
The most widely used stablecoin in the world, a digital token whose value is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar.
Volatility
How much and how fast an asset's price changes.
Web3
Web3 is the vision of an internet where users own their assets, their data, and their digital identity, with the blockchain as the ownership layer.
How we built this glossary
This glossary is written and reviewed by the Bitso editorial team — the most used crypto platform in Latin America, with more than 9 million people trading in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil. Every definition goes through product, compliance and financial-education specialists before being published.
Our goal is simple: that you truly understand what each concept means before moving your money. That's why we avoid unnecessary technical language and explain everything with examples designed for the region. If a term changes or a new one appears, we review it and keep it up to date.
Want to go deeper? Visit the Bitso blog, discover the available products or read our guides to get started in crypto.