Glossary⚓︎

AMA: Ask Me Anything. An open questions session.
AML: Anti Money Laundering.
APAC: Asia and Pacific region.
APR: Annual Percentage Rate.
Arbitrage: When a trader purchases an asset in a market and sells it in a different one, to profit from a deviation in prices between markets.
Backrunning: To broadcast transactionA with slightly lower gas (or fees) than an already pending transactionB so that transactionA gets mined right after transactionB in the same block.
BLS: A Boneh–Lynn–Shacham signature is a cryptographic signature scheme which allows a user to verify that a signer is authentic.
BTC: Bitcoin.
CBDC: Central Bank Digital Currency.
CEX: Centralized Exchange, as opposed to Decentralized Exchanges (DEX).
CLI: Command-Line Interface. A Program which is entirely used from a terminal console, using only the keyboard. Symbol has a CLI tool to interact with the blockchain.
CMC: Coin Market Cap. A web page with cryptocurrency information.
CSD: Central Securities Deposit.
DAO: Decentralized Autonomous Organization. An organization whose governance happens completely on a blockchain.
Dapp: Decentralized Application. An application that runs on a blockchain instead of a single computer. The term is slightly abused so, in a more general sense, it also means any application which makes use of a blockchain.
DDH: Decisional Diffie-Hellman.
DD: Due Diligence.
DeFi: Decentralized Finance, as opposed to Traditional Finance (TradFi).
DEX: Decentralized Exchange, as opposed to traditional Centralized Exchanges (CEX).
DTC: Direct To Consumer, i.e. mass market.
E2E: End-To-End.
EMEA: Europe, Middle-East and Africa.
ERC: Ethereum Request for Comment. Commonly utilized to refer to a token standard on the EVM (such as ERC-20, ERC-721, or ERC-1155).
ETH: Ethereum.
EVM: Ethereum Virtual Machine.
FFT: Fast Fourier Transform.
Frontrunning: To broadcast transactionA with slightly higher gas (or fees) than an already pending transactionB so that transactionA gets mined right before transactionB in the same block. This is important in case of DeFi markets, where gains can be made from frontrunning.
HTLC: Hashed Time-Lock Contract.
ICO: Initial Coin Offering.
IP: Intellectual Property.
IRS: Internal Revenue Service. Who you pay your taxes to if you live in the United States or are an American citizen.
KYC: Know Your Customer. Related to AML.
LATAM: Latin America (Central and South America).
MEV: Miner-Extractable Value, or Maximal-Extractable Value, is the process of reorganizing transactions inside a block by miners, to gain something. Uses Frontrunning, Backrunning, or Sandwich.
NAM: North America.
NEM: The New Economy Movement.
NFT: A non-fungible token, a way to represent individual entities as a blockchain-based asset. Coins are fungible, because they are all worth the same and can therefore be interchanged. Paintings are non-fungible, because each one is unique and therefore non-interchangeable.
NIS1: The first version of NEM's blockchain node that operates the public mainnet with the native currency XEM. First launched on March 31, 2015.
PoC: Proof of Concept, i.e., a prototype (not a consensus protocol).
PoI: Proof of Importance. The consensus protocol used by NIS1. Similar to PoS but measuring an account's activity besides its stake.
PoS: Proof of Stake. A consensus protocol, used, for example, by Ethereum.
PoS+: Proof-of-Stake Plus. Symbol's consensus mechanism. It is a modified PoS algorithm which considers users' activity in the network in addition to their network stakes. The chance that accounts will have to harvest a block is calculated through their importance scores.
PoW: Proof of Work. A consensus protocol, used, for example, by Bitcoin.
Rollback: The act of undoing a blockchain block that was previously confirmed, and reverting all its transactions.
Rug Pull: A malicious maneuver where cryptocurrency developers abandon a project and run off with the funds.
Sandwich: A type of MEV technique that is popular in DeFi. To make a sandwich, you find a pending transaction in the network and then try to surround it by placing one order just before the transaction (Frontrunning) and one order just after it (Backrunning).
SDK: Software Development Kit. A Software library used to simplify creating applications for a given platform.
Sharding: An Ethereum scaling solution.
SXDH: Symmetric External Diffie-Hellman.
TLC: Tender Loving Care.
TLS: Security protocol used to encrypting communication between peers on a network.
Token: A representation of a digital asset.
TPS: Transactions Per Second.
TradFi: Traditional Finance, as opposed to Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
USP: Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point. A characteristic of a product that can be used in advertising to differentiate it from its competitors.
VPS: Virtual Private Server. A virtual machine typically hosted on a data center which can be accessed remotely and treated as if it was a conventional physical machine.
VRF: Verifiable Random Function.
XEM: The native currency of the NIS1 blockchain.
XYM: The native currency of the Symbol blockchain.