Research · Trading Glossary
Trading Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the trading terms that start with T.
T
- Taint Analysis
- Assessing the extent to which funds trace back to illicit sources.
- Take-Profit Order
- An order triggered to close a position at a defined profit level.
- Taker
- A participant whose order executes against resting orders and removes liquidity.
- Taxable Event
- A transaction triggering a tax obligation. In many jurisdictions this includes crypto-to-crypto swaps, not only conversions to fiat.
- Technical Analysis (TA)
- Analysis of price and volume history to inform trading decisions.
- Tendermint / CometBFT
- A widely deployed BFT consensus engine providing single-block deterministic finality, used across the Cosmos ecosystem.
- Testnet
- A parallel network using valueless tokens, used for testing before deployment to mainnet.
- Testnet Deployment
- Publishing to a test network for validation before mainnet release.
- Threat Model
- The documented set of adversaries, capabilities, and assets a security design accounts for.
- Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS)
- A cryptographic scheme in which a signature is produced collectively by multiple parties without any single party ever holding the full private key. Produces a single on-chain signature, unlike multisig.
- Throughput
- The volume of transactions a network can process per unit of time.
- Ticker / Symbol
- The short identifier for a token. Not unique and not authoritative.
- Time Bandit Attack
- An attack in which a producer attempts to reorganize past blocks to recapture MEV.
- Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP)
- An execution strategy distributing an order evenly over a time period to reduce market impact.
- Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP) Oracle
- A price oracle that averages over a time window, reducing susceptibility to short-term manipulation.
- Timelock
- A mandatory delay between approving and executing a privileged action, giving users time to react to unfavourable changes.
- Token
- A digital asset issued on an existing blockchain, as opposed to a chain's own native asset.
- Token Allocation
- The division of total supply between team, investors, treasury, community, ecosystem, and liquidity.
- Token Contract
- The specific contract address defining a token. Verifying the contract address is the only reliable way to confirm a token's identity, since names and symbols can be freely duplicated.
- Token Contract Verification
- Confirming that a token's on-chain contract matches the official address published by the issuer. An essential control before any listing, integration, or support response.
- Token Generation Event (TGE)
- The point at which a token is created and distribution begins.
- Token URI
- The pointer from an NFT to its metadata location.
- Token Warrant / Token Side Letter
- Instruments granting equity investors a right to future token allocations.
- Tokenization
- The process of issuing a blockchain-based representation of an asset, along with the legal and operational structure that makes the representation enforceable.
- Tokenized Fund
- A collective investment vehicle whose shares are issued and transferred on-chain.
- Tokenized Treasuries
- On-chain instruments representing holdings of short-term government debt, a leading institutional RWA category.
- Tokenomics
- The economic design of a token: supply schedule, distribution, utility, and the mechanisms linking protocol activity to token value.
- Total Supply
- All tokens that currently exist, including those locked or reserved.
- Total Value Locked (TVL)
- The aggregate value of assets deposited in a protocol. A widely cited but imperfect metric, since it can double-count assets across composed protocols and moves with token prices.
- Trading Volume
- The value traded over a defined period. Reported volume should be treated cautiously given the persistence of wash trading on some venues.
- Traditional Finance (TradFi)
- The conventional banking, brokerage, and capital markets system.
- Trailing Stop
- A stop level that follows favourable price movement at a fixed distance.
- Traits / Attributes
- The characteristic properties of an NFT within a collection.
- Transaction
- A signed instruction submitted to a network, transferring value or invoking contract logic.
- Transaction Fee
- The total cost paid to have a transaction processed: gas used multiplied by the effective gas price.
- Transaction Graph
- The network of transfers between addresses, the primary object of forensic analysis.
- Transaction Hash (TxID)
- The unique identifier of a transaction, used to look it up on a block explorer.
- Transaction Monitoring
- Automated surveillance of activity against rules and behavioural models to detect suspicious patterns.
- Transactions Per Second (TPS)
- The common throughput measure. Comparisons across chains are frequently misleading, since transaction complexity, finality guarantees, and measurement conditions differ substantially.
- Travel Rule
- The requirement that originator and beneficiary information accompany transfers above a defined threshold between regulated institutions.
- Treasury
- The pool of assets controlled by a protocol or DAO to fund operations, grants, and incentives.
- Trust-Minimized Bridge
- A bridge whose security derives from cryptographic verification — light clients or validity proofs — rather than from operator trust.
- Trusted Bridge (Custodial Bridge)
- A bridge secured by a defined set of operators. Users rely on those operators' honesty and security practices.
- Trusted Setup
- A one-time ceremony generating public parameters for certain proof systems. Security depends on at least one participant destroying their secret contribution.
- Trustlessness
- The property of a system that allows participants to transact without relying on the honesty of any counterparty or intermediary, because correctness is enforced by cryptography and economic incentives.