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Explore Crypto Terms & Definitions
Selfish Mining
A mining strategy where a miner doesn't broadcast newly mined blocks, privately growing a rival chain in an attempt to eventually hijack the public chain with his longer private chain and claim block rewards.
SHA-256
The hashing algorithm used by Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mining software.
Sharpe Ratio
A measure of risk adjusted returns for investment. The ratio calculates the average excess return earned in relation to an asset's price volatility.
Shitcoin
Slang term for a cryptocurrency with no perceived real world use case.
Shorting
A trading position which profits when an asset declines in price. A trader will short a cryptocurrency if they believe its price is going to fall. Their profit will be in proportion to the decline below a specified level, but they will lose in proportion to price increase.
SIM Swap
A type of hacking achieved by social engineering access to a mobile network provider and ordering a new SIM which enables access to SMS based security codes.
Simple Payment Verfication (SPV)
A system that employs Merkle Trees to allow for secure transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain without the need to run a full node of the network.
Smart Contracts
A set of rules defined in code that can be executed by an underlying blockchain for a fee e.g smart contracts on Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain.
Soft Fork
A change to a blockchain protocol where only historic transactions become invalid after the update. Old nodes will recognise new transactions, described as backwards compatibility.
Sound Money
The idea that in order for money to be useful it should have specific characteristics: portable, divisible, fungible, durable, recognisable and most importantly, be scarce.
Sell Wall
The name given to a significant volume of Asks (people wanting to sell) at a specific price that creates the impression of a wall on the Depth Chart for a given cryptocurrency. See also Buy Wall.
Sharding
Blockchain property that enables data to be partitioned into more easily manageable chunks or shards, which can be processed in parallel, thereby greatly increasing the efficiency of the entire blockchain.
Shilling
Promoting a project or service because you are being paid or are directly benefiting.
Short
A trade that benefits from the price of a cryptocurrency falling e.g short position.
Sidechain
A secondary blockchain running in parallel and linked to the main blockchain e.g the Liquid Network is a sidechain based settlement network for Bitcoin trades.
Simple Moving Average
A Technical Analysis technique that uses on ongoing average of price, based on a fixed period, to help predict future price. SMA’s are calculated by adding a range of recent prices and then dividing that figure by a fixed number of days, weeks or months. e.g 7 Day Simple Moving Average is the sum of the previous seven days closing prices divided by seven. Read more about Moving Averages.
Slippage
The difference between the expected price of a cryptocurrency trade and the actual price at execution. Slippage usually occurs when there is high volatility in the market or not enough liquidity to fulfil orders.
Soft Cap
The minimum investment level a cryptocurrency project can receive from an investment round. If this minimum is not met, any money invested is returned to the relevant investors.
Solidity
The programming language for creating Smart Contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
Spent Funds
Those cryptocurrency funds used to fund a new transaction. They appear as Spent in the Output and Unspent in the Input. See also Unspent Funds.
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