Research · Trading Glossary

Trading Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the trading terms that start with M.

M

MACD: Moving Average Convergence Divergence, a momentum indicator based on the relationship between two moving averages.
Mainnet: The live production network where transactions carry real economic value.
Mainnet Fork: A local simulation of live chain state, used to test against real conditions and real deployed protocols.
Maintenance Margin: The minimum collateral required to keep a position open.
Maker: A participant whose order rests on the book and adds liquidity.
Maker-Taker Fees: The fee schedule charging takers more than makers, and sometimes rebating makers, to incentivize liquidity provision.
Malicious Approval: A transaction that appears benign but grants a hostile contract permission to move a user's tokens.
Margin Call: A demand for additional collateral when a position approaches the maintenance threshold.
Margin Trading: Trading with borrowed funds to increase position size.
Market Cap at Launch: The initial circulating valuation, a key determinant of subsequent price behaviour.
Market Capitalization: Circulating supply multiplied by current price.
Market Cycle: The recurring progression through accumulation, expansion, distribution, and contraction phases.
Market Depth: The volume of resting orders at successive price levels; a measure of how much size the market can absorb.
Market Maker: A firm that continuously quotes both buy and sell prices, providing liquidity and earning the spread.
Market Making: Continuously quoting both sides of a market to earn the spread while managing inventory risk.
Market Order: An order executing immediately at the best available prices.
Marketplace: A venue for listing and trading NFTs.
Max Fee: The ceiling a sender sets on total per-gas payment; any excess over base fee plus priority fee is refunded.
Max Pain: The strike price at which the largest notional value of options would expire worthless.
Max Supply: The maximum number of tokens that can ever exist, where such a cap is defined.
Maxi: A maximalist; someone committed to a single asset or ecosystem to the exclusion of others.
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV): The value that can be extracted by a party with the ability to include, exclude, or reorder transactions within a block. Originally "miner extractable value."
Meme Coin: A token whose value derives primarily from community attention and social momentum rather than from cash flows or protocol utility.
Memo / Destination Tag: An identifier required by some networks and exchanges to attribute a deposit to the correct account. Omitting it is a leading cause of lost deposits.
Mempool: The set of valid transactions that have been broadcast but not yet included in a block. Each node maintains its own view of the mempool.
Merkle Proof: The minimal set of hashes needed to prove that a specific item is included under a given Merkle root, without revealing the full dataset.
Merkle Root: The single hash at the top of a Merkle tree, committing to the entire dataset beneath it. Stored in block headers.
Merkle Tree: A tree structure in which each leaf is a hash of a data item and each internal node is a hash of its children. Allows efficient verification that a specific item belongs to a large dataset.
Metadata: The descriptive data associated with an NFT: name, image reference, attributes.
Metaverse: Persistent virtual environments in which digital assets, identity, and social activity converge.
MEV Protection (RPC-level): Submission endpoints that route transactions privately and refund a share of extracted value.
MEV-Boost: The widely deployed out-of-protocol implementation of proposer-builder separation on Ethereum.
MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation): The European Union's comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto-asset issuance and service provision.
Miner: A participant in proof of work performing the computation required to produce blocks.
Mining Pool: A collective of miners combining hashrate and sharing rewards proportionally to contributed work, reducing income variance.
Mint: The creation of new token units.
Mint and Redeem Mechanism: The primary market process by which authorized parties create and destroy stablecoin supply, and the mechanism through which arbitrage restores the peg.
Minting: Creating a new NFT on-chain.
Mixer / Tumbler: A service that pools and redistributes funds to break transaction traceability. Subject to significant regulatory attention and, in several jurisdictions, sanctions.
Modifier: Reusable code in Solidity attached to functions to enforce preconditions such as access control.
Modular Blockchain: An architecture separating execution, settlement, consensus, and data availability into specialized layers that can be independently optimized and recombined.
Money Lego: The characterization of DeFi protocols as interoperable components that can be stacked into more complex products.
Money Market: In DeFi, a pooled lending market with algorithmically determined interest rates.
Money Services Business (MSB): A US registration category applicable to many crypto businesses.
Monitoring & Alerting: Systems detecting anomalies in balances, latency, failure rates, and transaction patterns, with defined escalation paths.
Monolithic Blockchain: An architecture in which a single chain handles execution, settlement, consensus, and data availability together.
Moon / To the Moon: A sharp upward price move.
Move: A resource-oriented smart contract language designed to make asset duplication and loss impossible at the type-system level.
Moving Average (MA / EMA): A smoothed average of price over a lookback window; the exponential variant weights recent data more heavily.
Multi-Party Computation (MPC): A broader technique allowing several parties to jointly compute a function over private inputs. Widely used in institutional custody to eliminate single points of key compromise.
Multicall: A contract pattern enabling several calls to be executed in one transaction.
Multisig Treasury: The wallet structure controlling DAO funds, requiring multiple approvals.
Multisig Wallet: A smart contract wallet requiring approval from m of n signers. The standard structure for company treasuries, DAO funds, and protocol administration.
Multisignature (Multisig): A configuration requiring signatures from m of n designated keys to authorize a transaction. Standard practice for treasuries and shared custody.