Explained page 2

Market cap is price times circulating supply — a snapshot of the last trade, not a running total of money invested and not a verdict on a project's quality.

The gap between what a buyer will pay and a seller will accept is a real transaction cost, and it can be expressed two different ways that give different numbers for the same trade.

The 1946 citrus-grove case still decides whether a crypto sale counts as a securities transaction. A March 2026 joint SEC-CFTC interpretation added a five-category token taxonomy and clarified when a token's investment-contract status begins and ends - but the underlying test is unchanged, and no court has yet applied the new interpretation.

Exchanges and other regulated crypto providers must already attach sender and recipient details to transfers above a threshold — $1,000 under the global FATF baseline, $3,000 in the US, zero in the EU — and these thresholds are current law, not proposals. A separate set of FATF revisions adopted in June 2025 changes the rule further, but those changes do not take legal effect until the end of 2030.

When a trade gets front-run or sandwiched, the profit usually flows to whoever controls block ordering - and that is not always the bot that spotted the opportunity.

A halving cuts the block subsidy in half on a fixed schedule enforced by every node. It does not touch transaction fees, difficulty or hashrate directly - and what happened to miner economics after April 2024 is a mix of protocol fact and unaudited estimate.

People say a rollup "inherits Ethereum's security" — this is what that phrase covers mechanically, and what it leaves for a reader to check chain by chain.

If you hold stETH or rETH, you hold a claim on a staked position - not the staked asset itself. Here is how that claim is accounted for, how it can be redeemed, and why its price can move away from the underlying value.

A price oracle is how a smart contract learns what an asset is worth. Losses happen two different ways — the oracle reports a false price, or it faithfully reports a real price that someone paid to distort — and the fixes for one do not cover the other.

A depeg happens when the arbitrage path between market price and issuer redemption breaks. Whether it reopens - and how fast - explains why USDC and DAI recovered in days, USDT in weeks, and UST never did.

Holding your own crypto keys comes down to two mechanical requirements — a wallet that generates keys locally, and a tested, redundant backup. The seed phrase is where nearly all real-world risk lives, not the cryptography behind it.

Somewhere between a leaderboard and an auction house sits BuyTheTop.lol, a new pay-for-rank board built for crypto projects that want a moment of visibility without buying a traditional ad slot. The pitch is blunt: drop a link or an X handle, bid SOL, and your bid decides exactly where you land.

The trade behind years of Bitcoin ETF inflows was never really a bet on price. It was a bet on a spread - and when the spread stopped paying more than a Treasury bond, the money moved.

A quarterly SEC disclosure gives an exact share count and dollar value for one filer on one date. It does not show whether that filer was buying, selling, hedging, or simply holding ETF creation inventory.

Assets freeze the moment an exchange files. What comes back, if anything, is usually decided by a court - and FTX's case shows it may arrive as cash, valued on the filing date, not as the coins you deposited.

An audit checks named code at a named commit against a defined threat model. It says nothing about the deployment, the keys, the governance, or the front end around that code — and the industry's own loss data cannot agree on how big that gap is.

A reserve check proves an exchange controls a pile of crypto. It rarely proves the pile is big enough to cover what customers are owed - and that gap is where the real risk lives.

A walkthrough of what happens on-chain when you click "approve" in a wallet, why the permission does not expire on its own, and what revoking one does and does not undo.