🎓Glossary

Key terms to understand in crypto

Airdrop - To send an NFT or NFTs to a wallet free of charge. NFTs can be airdropped for a number of reasons, such as to promote a new collection or reward someone for participating in a contest.

Ape in - To heavily invest in a new project, usually out of fear of missing out.

Avatar project - Sometimes used interchangeably with terms like PFP and generative art, an avatar project is a collection of cartoon avatar NFTs, usually represented as a portrait depicting the avatar from the shoulders or neck up.

Delist - To remove an NFT from an exchange. Delisting an NFT incurs gas fees. NFT communities often encourage holders to delist NFTs before big announcements.

Discord - An instant messaging platform and the go-to place for discussing NFTs.

DYOR - is short for “Do Your Own Research,” a disclaimer often used in crypto investment opinions online to remind users to take responsibility for their own investment decisions.

Flipping - is a recently coined term that refers to buying an asset and selling it quickly for a profit. It's not limited to non-fungible tokens only, you can flip any valuable asset including trading cards, cars, real estate, or antiques. When it comes to NFTs, to flip just means to buy low and sell high

Floor price - The lowest NFT price in a collection. To “buy the floor” or "floor sweep" is to buy the cheapest NFT in a collection.

Floor sweep - To buy up the cheapest NFTs in a collection. Sweeps can be organized by an NFT collection’s community to raise the project’s floor price.

FUD - abbreviation. fear, uncertainty, doubt.

Fungibility - Replaceability. Dollars are fungible because a dollar owed can be paid using any dollar in existence. Something that is non-fungible, like a painting or NFT, is one-of-a-kind.

Generative art - A project in which NFTs are generated from a pool of limited assets. In a generative art collection, each NFT can have a unique set of traits while still sharing individual traits with other NFTs in the collection.

HODL - an acronym for “hold on for dear life,” an encouragement to other crypto investors not to sell when prices fall.

IRL - In Real Life

Inter Planetary File System - A means of storing NFT data that is considered superior to storing on an HTTP gateway URL, since the latter is tied to a specific provider. IPFS addresses allow users to find a piece of content so long as someone on the network is hosting it.

Metadata - The collection of data that defines ownership and differentiates one NFT from another. Metadata can be on-chain or off-chain.

Metaverse - A virtual 3D world where people can interact.

Minting - The process by which an NFT becomes part of the blockchain. Once an asset is put on the blockchain, it is “minted” as a token and cannot be altered.

NFT / Non-Fungible Token - is a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain, and that is used to certify authenticity and ownership

Off-chain metadata - Metadata that is stored outside the blockchain.

On-chain metadata - Metadata that is directly incorporated in a smart contract.

Paperhands - is a slang term used to refer to investors who sell investments too early, often because they are risk averse

PFP - Profile picture. A PFP NFT is an NFT that people like to show off as their main photo on platforms like Twitter.

Rarity - An important measure of an NFT’s value. The overall rarity of an NFT is usually determined by calculating the scarcity of its individual traits, e.g., by averaging them or multiplying them together.

Roadmap - A document that maps out the goals and next steps for an NFT project.

Royalties - Money earned by an NFT creator through the token’s resale. Some NFTs automatically pay royalties each time an NFT is sold. An NFT can be hardcoded to pay an artist royalty forever, an interesting use case that has the potential to shake up the music industry.

Rug pull - A classic scam in which a cryptocurrency or NFT project is promoted only for its creators and developers to disappear and run away with the money. A soft rug pull is a pernicious variation in which the developers reappear now and again to create the illusion that the project is legitimate.

Shilling - Promoting, advertising, marketing. To shill an NFT is to promote it.

Smart Contract - A self-executing digital contract. NFTs are composed of code written in smart contract programming language like Solidity.

Token-Gating - is “a way of adding more value to an NFT by allowing the holder exclusive access to a community, content, or even physical products in addition to the digital token.

Utility Coin - is a crypto token that serves some use case within a specific ecosystem. These tokens allow users to perform some action on a certain network. They are usually pre-mined, being created all at once and distributed in a manner chosen by the team behind the project.

Whales - are individuals or entities that own large quantities of a specific cryptocurrency. Generally speaking, a crypto whale is an entity that holds enough digital currency to significantly influence market prices by trading significant amounts of coins and tokens.

Whitelist - An exclusive list of users who get guaranteed early access to mint a new NFT collection at a specified date and time.