Glossary: markets, AI and digital assets, defined

A software system built on an AI model that can plan and carry out multi-step tasks, using tools and taking actions with limited human direction.

A securities offering in which a listed company sells new shares gradually into the open market at prevailing prices through a broker, rather than in a single priced deal.

A settlement method in which both legs of a trade, such as asset and payment, complete together in one indivisible transaction or not at all.

A financial institution, usually a large broker-dealer, that has an agreement with an ETF issuer to create and redeem fund shares in large blocks.

A trading strategy that buys an asset in the spot market and sells a futures contract on it to capture the price difference, known as the basis.

A privacy-focused blockchain network for financial institutions, built by Digital Asset, that connects separately operated ledgers so they can transact atomically.

A category of spending in which a company buys or upgrades long-lived physical assets, such as buildings, data centers, equipment or chips.

A proposed US law that would set a federal market structure framework for digital assets, dividing oversight between the SEC and CFTC; it failed a Senate vote in September 2026.

A method of holding digital assets in which the private keys are generated and kept on devices that are never connected to the internet.

A debt instrument that pays interest and can be converted into a set number of the issuer's shares, combining fixed income features with an equity call option.

A measure of the electrical power available to run a data center's computing equipment, such as servers, storage and networking, excluding cooling and other facility overhead.

A firm authorized under the EU's MiCA regulation to provide crypto-asset services such as custody, exchange, trading platform operation, brokerage or portfolio management.

A category of financial applications built on public blockchains that provide services such as trading, lending and derivatives through smart contracts rather than traditional intermediaries.

A tokenized asset that holders can transfer peer to peer to external wallets, letting it move across protocols and venues beyond the issuer's own platform.

A chart published by the Federal Reserve showing each FOMC participant's projection for the appropriate federal funds rate at the end of upcoming years and over the longer run.

A type of crypto-asset under the EU's MiCA regulation that aims to maintain a stable value by referencing a single official currency, such as the euro or dollar.

A token standard for Ethereum-compatible blockchains that embeds identity checks and transfer rules so permissioned securities can only move between eligible holders.

A committee of the US Federal Reserve that sets monetary policy, including the target range for the federal funds rate and the size of the Fed's balance sheet.

A measure of cash a company generates from operations after paying for the capital expenditures needed to maintain and grow its asset base.

Exchange rules approved by the SEC that let qualifying products list without a separate rule change filing for each new fund.

A US federal law, signed in July 2025, that creates a licensing and supervisory framework for issuers of payment stablecoins.

A processor designed to perform many calculations in parallel, originally for graphics and now the main hardware used to train and run AI models.

A scheduled event in Bitcoin's protocol that cuts the block subsidy paid to miners in half every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years.

A metric estimating the daily revenue a bitcoin miner earns per unit of computing power, commonly quoted in dollars per petahash per second per day.

A measure of the total computing power used to mine and secure a proof-of-work blockchain, expressed in hashes per second.

A company that operates cloud computing and data center infrastructure at very large global scale, such as the leading public cloud providers.

A process in which ETF shares are created or redeemed by exchanging the underlying assets themselves, rather than cash, between the fund and authorized participants.

The process of running a trained AI model to generate outputs, such as text, images or predictions, in response to new inputs.

A network built on top of a base blockchain that processes transactions separately and posts data or proofs back to the base layer to inherit its security.

A method of staking in which a protocol stakes tokens on a user's behalf and issues a transferable token representing the staked position and its accruing rewards.

A European Union regulation that sets harmonized rules for issuing crypto-assets and for providing crypto-asset services across all member states.

A valuation ratio that compares a company's market value with the net value of the digital assets it holds on its balance sheet.

A cryptographic technique that lets several parties jointly produce a result, such as a transaction signature, without any party ever holding the complete secret key.

An oracle that publishes a fund or asset's net asset value onchain so smart contracts can price, mint, redeem or lend against tokenized holdings.

A specialized cloud provider focused on renting GPU computing capacity for AI training and inference, distinct from the large general-purpose cloud platforms.

A capitalization table maintained on a blockchain, recording a company's or fund's equity owners and their holdings as the authoritative register.

A service that delivers external data, such as asset prices, interest rates or event outcomes, to smart contracts on a blockchain.

A legal category under US law for a digital asset designed for payment or settlement that the issuer must redeem at a fixed amount of money.

A blockchain where only approved participants can run nodes, validate transactions or read data, as opposed to an open public network.

A class of equity with no maturity date that pays a fixed or floating dividend and ranks ahead of common stock but behind debt in a company's capital structure.

A long-term contract in which a buyer agrees to purchase electricity from a specific generator, or its output, at agreed prices over a set period.

A market in which participants trade contracts that pay out based on whether a specified future event occurs, so prices reflect the crowd's implied probability.

A verification method that shows an issuer or custodian holds assets equal to or greater than the tokens or customer balances it has outstanding.

A consensus mechanism in which blockchain validators are chosen to create and confirm blocks in proportion to the tokens they have locked as collateral.

A consensus mechanism in which miners compete to solve computational puzzles, and the winner earns the right to add the next block and collect rewards.

A regulated institution, such as a bank, trust company or registered broker-dealer, that may hold client assets on behalf of US registered investment advisers.

A monetary policy process in which a central bank reduces the size of its balance sheet, typically by letting bonds mature without reinvesting the proceeds.

An interest rate or bond yield adjusted for expected inflation, representing the return an investor earns in terms of purchasing power.

A category of blockchain tokens that represent ownership of, or claims on, traditional assets such as bonds, funds, equities, real estate, credit or commodities.

A disclosure under revenue accounting standards showing the total contracted revenue a company has not yet recognized because it has not yet delivered the goods or services.

A tokenized asset recorded on a blockchain for registry or reporting purposes but not freely transferable outside the issuer's or custodian's controlled system.

A report by an independent accounting firm confirming that an issuer's reported reserves matched or exceeded its outstanding tokens at a specific point in time.

A program stored on a blockchain that executes automatically when predefined conditions are met, without relying on a central operator.

A legal entity created to hold specific assets or risks separately from its sponsor, often used to package assets for tokenization or investment.

An exchange-traded fund that holds the underlying asset directly, such as bitcoin or ether, rather than futures contracts or other derivatives.

A digital token designed to hold a stable value, usually one unit of a fiat currency, through reserves of cash and short-term assets or other mechanisms.

A process in which holders lock tokens on a proof-of-stake blockchain to help secure the network and validate transactions, in return for protocol rewards.

A tokenized asset pledged as margin or loan security, allowing collateral to move and be revalued onchain rather than through traditional custody transfers.

A digital token issued by a regulated bank that represents a customer deposit claim on that bank, carried on a blockchain ledger.

A digital token that represents ownership of physical gold held in vaults, typically one token per fine troy ounce or a fixed fraction of one.

A money market fund whose shares are issued or recorded as blockchain tokens, giving holders short-term government yield in an onchain, transferable form.

A blockchain token that represents a share of a listed or private company, or an economic claim tracking that share, issued directly or by an intermediary.

A blockchain token that represents shares in a fund or vehicle holding US Treasury bills, notes or repurchase agreements, passing the interest income to token holders.

A metric measuring the market value of assets deposited in a decentralized finance protocol or blockchain's smart contracts at a given time.

The total computing work used to train an AI model, typically measured in floating point operations, or FLOP, and driven by model size and training data.

A regulated entity that maintains the official record of a security's owners and processes issuance, transfers, redemptions and corporate actions for the issuer.

A compliance control that restricts holding or receiving a token to pre-approved wallet addresses, usually after identity and eligibility checks.

An open payment protocol, introduced by Coinbase in 2025, that uses the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code to let clients and AI agents pay for online resources with stablecoins.