Trading Glossary

R

Rarity

The relative scarcity of a token's trait combination.

Rate Limit

A cap on request volume within a time window, typically enforced per API key.

Real World Asset (RWA)

A traditional off-chain asset — treasuries, credit, real estate, commodities — represented as a token on-chain.

Real Yield

Returns derived from actual protocol revenue rather than from token emissions.

Realized Price / Realized Cap

On-chain valuation measures based on the price at which each unit of supply last moved.

Rebase Token

A token whose holder balances adjust automatically as supply changes, rather than the price adjusting.

Receipt Token / Vault Share

A token representing a claim on assets deposited into a protocol.

Reconciliation

Verifying that internal ledger balances match on-chain holdings. A core daily control for any custodial operation.

Record Retention

The obligation to preserve customer and transaction records for a prescribed period.

Redemption

The process of exchanging a stablecoin for its underlying reference asset with the issuer.

Redundancy

Duplicate infrastructure maintained so that no single failure interrupts service.

Reentrancy

A condition where an external call allows the called contract to re-enter the calling function before its state updates complete.

Reentrancy Attack

Exploiting a contract that makes an external call before finalizing its internal state, allowing repeated withdrawal.

Regulatory Sandbox

A supervised environment permitting limited operation of novel products under relaxed requirements.

Rekt

Suffering heavy losses, usually via liquidation.

Relative Strength Index (RSI)

A momentum oscillator bounded between zero and one hundred, commonly used to assess overbought and oversold conditions.

Relay

In PBS, the intermediary transmitting blocks from builders to proposers while withholding contents until commitment.

Relayer

A party that transmits messages, transactions, or proofs between systems, often paying gas on a user's behalf.

Reorg Handling

Application logic ensuring that data derived from blocks later removed from the canonical chain is correctly reverted.

Replace-By-Fee (RBF)

Resubmitting a transaction with the same nonce and a higher fee to replace the original. The mechanism behind "speed up" and "cancel" buttons in wallets.

Replay Attack

Rebroadcasting a valid transaction from one chain or context on another where it is also valid. Chain IDs and nonces are the standard defences.

Request for Quote (RFQ)

A workflow in which a trader requests firm prices from one or more counterparties.

Reserves

The assets backing a stablecoin. Composition, custody arrangements, and attestation frequency are the substantive questions for any reserve-backed instrument.

Resistance

A price level where selling interest has historically halted advances.

Responsible Disclosure

Reporting a vulnerability privately to the affected party with time to remediate before publication.

Restaking

Reusing staked assets to provide cryptoeconomic security to additional protocols, earning additional rewards while compounding slashing exposure.

Retail

Individual, non-professional market participants.

Retroactive Airdrop

An airdrop rewarding past usage of a protocol, designed to reach genuine users rather than speculators.

Retroactive Public Goods Funding

Rewarding contributions after their value has become evident, on the reasoning that past impact is easier to assess than future potential.

Reveal

The point after minting at which final metadata and artwork are disclosed.

Revert

The failure of a transaction during execution, undoing all state changes while still consuming gas.

Revoke

Setting an existing allowance back to zero. A routine hygiene practice.

Ring Signature

A signature produced on behalf of a group, where the actual signer cannot be identified among the group members.

Risk-Based Approach

The principle of allocating compliance resources in proportion to assessed risk rather than applying uniform controls.

Rollup

A Layer 2 that executes transactions off-chain and posts transaction data and state commitments to a Layer 1, which serves as the settlement and data availability layer.

Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS)

Managed platforms for deploying and operating custom rollups without building the stack in-house.

Royalty

A percentage of secondary sale proceeds directed to the creator. Enforcement is marketplace-dependent rather than guaranteed at the token level.

RPC Endpoint

The network interface through which applications read chain state and submit transactions.

RPC Provider

A managed service offering node access via API.

Rug

Short for rug pull.

Rug Pull

A project's operators removing liquidity or funds and abandoning the project.

Runbook

Step-by-step operational procedures for routine and exceptional scenarios.

Runway

The period a treasury can sustain operations at current expenditure levels.

Rust

A systems programming language widely used for smart contracts on Solana, Polkadot, and NEAR.