Messari Academy

Comprehensive list of important terms, definitions, and concepts for anyone looking to learn more about the emerging blockchain and crypto space

Areas of study

Cryptoeconomics

Cryptography

Distributed systems

Game theory

Blockchain Basics

51% attack

Block header

Block reward

Block size

Blockchain

Byzantine General's Problem

Cryptoasset

Difficulty level

Distributed ledger technology (DLT)

Double spending

Halving

Hash function

Hash power

Mempool

Mining

Node

Orphan block

Private key

Public key

Seed phrase

Smart contracts

Stablecoins

Consensus / Validation

Candidate block

Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS)

Fork

Generalized mining

Hard Fork

Masternode

Merge mine

Nakamoto consensus

Proof-of-Authority (PoA)

Proof-of-Burn (PoB)

Proof-of-Stake (PoS)

Proof-of-Work (PoW)

Soft fork

Staking

Staking-as-a-service (StaaS)

Fundraising / Launch

Airdrop

Bonding curve

Decentralized autonomous initial coin offering (DAICO)

Initial coin offering (ICO)

Initial exchange offering (IEO)

Lockdrop

Merkle mine

Governance

Governance

Bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP)

Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP)

On-chain governance

Privacy

Mimblewimble

Privacy technologies

Zero-knowledge proofs

zk-SNARKS

Properties

Decentralization

Intrinsic value

Schelling point

Social scalability

Technical

Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)

Atomic swap

Difficulty Bomb

Directed acyclic graph (DAG)

Distributed denial of service (DDoS)

Elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA)

Ethereum request for comment - 20 (ERC-20)

Ethereum virtual machine (EVM)

Hashed timelock contracts (HTLC)

Merkle tree

Nonce

Progressive Proof-of-work (ProgPoW)

Revocable sequence maturity contract (RSMC)

SHA-265

State channel

UTXO

WASM

Web 3

Trading / Investing

Bid / Ask

Dutch auction

Front-running

Liquidity

Security tokens

Wash trading

Transacting / Holding

Custody

Hot wallet

Multi-signature

Non-custodial

Wallets

Token Model / Usage

Burn and mint models

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)

Decentralized exchange (DEX)

Decentralized application (dApp)

Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Non-fungible tokens (NFT)

Token curated registry (TCR)

Work tokens

Scaling

Lightning network

Scaling

Segregated witness (SegWit)

Sidechain

Miscellaneous

How to earn free Bitcoin

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