Industry WIKI

Algorand is a proof-of-stake blockchain and cryptocurrency. Algorand's native cryptocurrency is called ALGO.

Algorithmic trading is a method of executing orders using automated pre-programmed trading instructions accounting for variables such as time, price, and volume. This type of trading attempts to leverage the speed and computational resources of computers relative to human traders. In the twenty-first century, algorithmic trading has been gaining traction with both retail and institutiona

An Asian option (or average value option) is a special type of option contract. For Asian options, the payoff is determined by the average underlying price over some pre-set period of time. This is different from the case of the usual European option and American option, where the payoff of the option contract depends on the price of the underlying instrument at exercise; Asian options a

Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown person published a white paper under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation. From 2021 to 2025, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender curren

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree, where data nodes are represented by leaves). Since each block contains information about the previous block, they e

Blockchain privacy describes how blockchain systems handle the confidentiality of transaction and record data. Many public blockchains can provide pseudonymity, while ledger transparency can allow transaction tracing through analysis of on-chain activity and related information. The persistence of ledger data can also create data-protection challenges in some applications, including ques

In mathematics, the Chan–Karolyi–Longstaff–Sanders process (abbreviated as CKLS process) is a stochastic process with applications to finance. In particular it has been used to model the term structure of interest rates. The CKLS process can also be viewed as a generalization of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. It is named after K. C. Chan, G. Andrew Karolyi, Francis A. Longstaff, and Ant

In finance, a contract for difference (CFD) is a financial agreement between two parties, commonly referred to as the "buyer" and the "seller." The contract stipulates that the buyer will pay the seller the difference between the value of an asset at the time the contract was initiated and the current value of the asset. If the asset's price increases from the opening to the closing of t

Copy trading enables individuals in the financial markets to automatically copy positions opened and managed by other selected individuals.

Covered interest arbitrage is an arbitrage trading strategy whereby an investor capitalizes on the interest rate differential between two countries by using a forward contract to cover (eliminate exposure to) exchange rate risk. Using forward contracts enables arbitrageurs such as individual investors or banks to make use of the forward premium (or discount) to earn a riskless profit fro

Cryptocurrency is a type of digital asset that uses distributed ledger, or blockchain, technology to enable a secure transaction.

Cryptocurrency has been used extensively in criminal activities, such as investment and romance scams (often called "pig-butchering"), ransomware payments, thefts and exchange hacks, money laundering and sanctions evasion, darknet-market transactions, and off-chain coercion to obtain private keys. Law enforcement notes that investment fraud and laundering are frequent criminal uses of cr

A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency excha

Cryptojacking is the act of exploiting a computer to mine cryptocurrencies, often through websites, against the user's will or while the user is unaware. One notable piece of software used for cryptojacking was Coinhive, which was used in over two-thirds of cryptojacks before its March 2019 shutdown. The cryptocurrencies mined the most often are privacy coins—coins with hidden transactio

A decentralised application (DApp, dApp, Dapp, or dapp) is an application that can operate autonomously, typically through the use of smart contracts, that run on a blockchain or other distributed ledger system. DApps provide a function or utility to their users with less human intervention. Control over some DApps is distributed over holders of tokens that represent ownership over a DAp

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a software system for organization of other computer programs handled through a decentralized ledger technology like a blockchain. These systems are used most commonly to handle voting and finances, among other processes. The precise legal status of this type of organization system is unclear.

A distributed ledger (also called a shared ledger or distributed ledger technology or DLT) is a system whereby replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data is geographically spread (distributed) across many sites, countries, or institutions. In contrast to a centralized database, a distributed ledger does not require a central administrator, and consequently does not have a single (

ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting) was a computer technology that automated bank bookkeeping and check processing. Developed at the nonprofit research institution SRI International under contract from Bank of America, the project began in 1950 and was publicly revealed in September 1955.

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software.

A financial centre (financial center in American English) or financial hub is a location with a significant concentration of commerce in financial services.

Firo, formerly known as Zcoin, is a cryptocurrency aimed at using cryptography to provide better privacy for its users compared to other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

Food speculation refers to the buying and selling of futures contracts or other commodity derivatives by traders with the aim of profiting from changes in food prices. Food speculation can be both positive and negative for food producers and buyers. It is betting on food prices in financial markets.

A green bond is a fixed-income financial instrument (bond) which is used to fund projects that have positive environmental benefits. When referring to climate change mitigation projects they are also known as climate bonds. Green bonds follow the Green Bond Principles stated by the International Capital Market Association (ICMA), and the proceeds from the issuance of which are to be used

High-frequency trading (HFT) is a type of algorithmic automated trading system in finance characterized by high speeds, high turnover rates, and high order-to-trade ratios that leverages high-frequency financial data and electronic trading tools. While there is no single definition of HFT, among its key attributes are highly sophisticated algorithms, co-location, and very short-term inve

IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger and cryptocurrency designed for the Internet of things (IoT). It uses a directed acyclic graph to store transactions on its ledger, motivated by a potentially higher scalability over blockchain based distributed ledgers. IOTA does not use miners to validate transactions, instead, nodes that issue a new transaction on the network must approve two

In investing and finance, the low-volatility anomaly is the observation that low-volatility securities have higher returns than high-volatility securities in most markets studied. In other words, assets whose prices or returns change wildly pay worse than assets whose prices or returns are steady. This is an example of a stock market anomaly since it contradicts the central prediction of

M-PESA (M for mobile, PESA is Swahili for money) is a mobile phone-based money transfer service, payments and micro-financing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone and Safaricom, the largest mobile network operator in Kenya. It has since expanded to Tanzania, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Ghana, Egypt, and Ethiopia. The rollouts in India, Romania, and Alban

A market anomaly in a financial market is predictability that seems to be inconsistent with (typically risk-based) theories of asset prices. Standard theories include the capital asset pricing model and the Fama-French Three Factor Model, but a lack of agreement among academics about the proper theory leads many to refer to anomalies without a reference to a benchmark theory (Daniel and

Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to borrowers with limited access to traditional credit who typically do not have access to traditional banking services due to a lack of collateral, steady employment, and a verifiable credit history. The primary aim of microcredit is to support entrepreneurship, facilitate self-employment, and alleviate poverty, particularly

In the context of cryptocurrency mining, a mining pool is the pooling of resources by miners, who share their processing power over a network, to split the reward equally, according to the amount of work they contributed to the probability of finding a block. A "share" is awarded to members of the mining pool who present a valid partial proof-of-work. Mining in pools began when the diffi

Mitigation banking is a market-based system of debits and credits (used primarily in the United States as part of its "no net loss" policy) that involves restoration, creation, or enhancement of wetlands to compensate for unavoidable impacts to a wetland in another location. It involves a system of mitigation banks, sites where projects to restore, create, or enhance wetlands can be carr

Nano (Abbreviation: XNO) is a cryptocurrency characterized by a directed acyclic graph data structure and distributed ledger, making it possible for Nano to work without intermediaries. To agree on what transactions to commit (i.e., achieving consensus), it uses a voting system with weight based on the amount of currency an account holds.

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain and is used to certify ownership and authenticity. They typically contain references to digital files such as artworks, photos, videos, and audio. Because NFTs are uniquely identifiable, they differ from cryptocurrencies (which are fungible, hence the name non-fungible token), and as a result they

OpenTimestamps (OTS) is an open-source project that aims to provide a standard format for blockchain timestamping.

Polkadot is a decentralized, nominated proof-of-stake blockchain with smart contract functionality. The cryptocurrency native to the blockchain is the DOT.

Proof of personhood (PoP) is a means of resisting malicious attacks on peer-to-peer networks, particularly attacks that use multiple fake identities, otherwise known as a Sybil attack. Decentralized online platforms are particularly vulnerable to such attacks by their very nature, as notionally democratic and responsive to large voting blocks. In PoP, each unique human participant obtain

Proof of space (PoS) is a type of consensus algorithm achieved by demonstrating one's legitimate interest in a service (such as sending an email) by allocating a non-trivial amount of memory or disk space to solve a challenge presented by the service provider. The concept was formulated in 2013 by Dziembowski et al. and (with a different formulation) by Ateniese et al..

Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This is done to avoid the computational cost of proof-of-work (PoW) schemes. The first functioning use of PoS for cryptocurrency was Peercoin in 2012, although its scheme, on the surface, still r

Proof of work (also written as proof-of-work, and abbreviated PoW) is a form of cryptographic proof in which one party (the prover) proves to others (the verifiers) that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended. Verifiers can subsequently confirm this expenditure with minimal effort on their part. The concept was first proposed by Moni Naor and Cynthia Dwork

Regulation of algorithms, or algorithmic regulation, is the creation of laws, rules and public sector policies for promotion and regulation of algorithms, particularly in artificial intelligence and machine learning. For the subset of AI algorithms, the term regulation of artificial intelligence is used. The regulatory and policy landscape for artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging

Risk parity (or risk premia parity) is an approach to investment management which focuses on allocation of risk, usually defined as volatility, rather than allocation of capital. The risk parity approach asserts that when asset allocations are adjusted (leveraged or deleveraged) to the same risk level, the risk parity portfolio can achieve a higher Sharpe ratio and can be more resistant

A stock market, equity market, or share market is the aggregation of buyers and sellers of stocks (also called as shares), which represent ownership claims on businesses; these may include securities listed on a public stock exchange as well as stock that is only traded privately, such as shares of private companies that are sold to investors through equity crowdfunding platforms. Invest

In finance, technical analysis is an analysis methodology for analysing and forecasting the direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume. As a type of active management, it stands in contradiction to much of modern portfolio theory. The efficacy of technical analysis is disputed by the efficient-market hypothesis, which states that stock market pr

Triangular arbitrage (also referred to as cross currency arbitrage or three-point arbitrage) is the act of exploiting an arbitrage opportunity resulting from a pricing discrepancy among three different currencies in the foreign exchange market. A triangular arbitrage strategy involves three trades, exchanging the initial currency for a second, the second currency for a third, and the thi

Tron (stylized in all caps) is a decentralized, proof-of-stake blockchain with smart contract functionality. The cryptocurrency native to the blockchain is known as Tronix (TRX). It was founded in March 2014 by Justin Sun and, since 2017, has been overseen and supervised by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit organization in Singapore, established in the same year. It is open-source softwa