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Digital assets and currencies

Understand assets, networks and trading mechanics with sources you can check.

Mining

Application-specific integrated circuit

An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 s

Payments & settlement

ATM

An automated teller machine (ATM) is an electronic telecommunications device that enables customers of financial institutions to perform financial transactions, such as cash withdrawals, deposits, funds transfers, balance or account information inquiries, at any time and without the need for direct interaction with bank staff.

Assets

Bitcoin

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

Trading basics

Bitcoin in El Salvador

El Salvador was the first country in the world to use bitcoin as legal tender, after it was adopted as such by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 2021. It has been promoted by Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who claimed that it would improve the economy by making banking easier for Salvadorans, and that it would encourage foreign investment. In 2022, more Salvadorians

Trading basics

Bitcoin protocol

The bitcoin protocol is the set of rules that govern the functioning of bitcoin. Its key components and principles are: a peer-to-peer decentralized network with no central oversight; the blockchain technology, a public ledger that records all bitcoin transactions; mining and proof of work, the process to create new bitcoins and verify transactions; and cryptographic security.

Assets

Bitdeer

Bitdeer Technologies Group, or simply Bitdeer, is a cryptocurrency mining and artificial intelligence (AI) cloud infrastructure company headquartered in Singapore and listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker BTDR. The company was spun off from bitcoin-mining chip producer Bitmain in January 2021 by founder Jihan Wu. Bitdeer is among the largest cryptocurrency miners by computing power and o

Securities & exchanges

China Securities Regulatory Commission

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) is a government agency directly under the State Council of China. It is the main regulator of the securities industry in China.

Payments & settlement

Contactless payment

Contactless payment systems are credit cards and debit cards, key fobs, smart cards, or other devices, including smartphones and other mobile devices, that use radio-frequency identification (RFID) or near-field communication (NFC) for making secure payments. The embedded integrated circuit chip and antenna enable consumers to wave their card, fob, or handheld device over a reader at the

Banking

Contactless smart card

A contactless smart card is a contactless credential whose dimensions are credit card size. Its embedded integrated circuits can store (and sometimes process) data and communicate with a terminal via NFC. Commonplace uses include transit tickets, bank cards and passports.

Assets

Cryptocurrency

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

Assets

Cryptocurrency and crime

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

Assets

Cryptojacking

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

Assets

Dogecoin

Dogecoin ( DOHJ-koyn or DOHZH-koyn, Abbreviation: DOGE; sign: Ð) is a cryptocurrency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system as a joke, making fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time. It is considered both the first "meme coin", and more specifically the first "dog coin". Despite its satirical nature, some

Trading basics

Environmental impact of bitcoin

The environmental impact of bitcoin has been characterized in the literature as significant, particularly due to its energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and electronic waste. Bitcoin mining, the process by which bitcoins are created and transactions are finalized, is energy-consuming due to it requiring a large amount of compute and results in carbon emissions. According to the 2025 Ca

Assets

Equihash

Equihash is a memory-hard Proof-of-work algorithm introduced by the University of Luxembourg's Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the 2016 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. The algorithm is based on a generalization of the Birthday problem which finds colliding hash values. It has severe time-space trade-offs but concedes vulnerability

Finance

Financial services in China

Financial services in China refers to the services provided in China by the finance industry: banks, investment banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, consumer finance companies, government sponsored enterprises, and stock brokerages.

Assets

Firo (cryptocurrency)

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.

Trading basics

Foreign-exchange reserves of China

The foreign exchange reserves of China are the state of foreign exchange reserves held by the People's Republic of China, comprising cash, bank deposits, bonds, and other financial assets denominated in currencies other than China's national currency (the renminbi). As of August 2026, China's foreign exchange reserves totaled US$3.438 trillion, which is the highest foreign exchange reser

Banking

Hardware security module

A hardware security module (HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages secrets (most importantly digital keys), and performs encryption and decryption functions for digital signatures, strong authentication and other cryptographic functions. These modules traditionally come in the form of a plug-in card or an external device that attaches directly to a computer or ne

Banking

History of banking in China

The history of banking in China includes the business of dealing with money and credit transactions in China.

Trading basics

IBM Retail Store Systems

This article describes IBM point of sale equipment from 1973 with the introduction of the IBM 3650 till 1986 with the introduction of the IBM 4680. IBM continued to announced new retail products until the sale of the IBM Retail Store Solutions business to Toshiba TEC, announced on 17 April 17 2012.

Trading basics

KGS (electronic toll collection)

KGS, acronym for Kartlı Geçiş Sistemi (literally: Pass System with Card), was an electronic toll collection system of contactless smart card type available on toll roads and toll bridges in Turkey. It was abolished on 1 February 2013. The system was adopted to avoid traffic congestion at toll plazas. An alternative to KGS is the OGS system of radio-frequency identification (RFID) transpo

Assets

Mining pool

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

Assets

Monero

Monero (; abbreviation: XMR) is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency which is private, untraceable, fungible, and decentralized.

Assets

Proof of work

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

Fiat currencies

Renminbi currency value

Renminbi currency value is a debate affecting the Chinese currency unit, the renminbi (Chinese: 人民币 Code:CNY). The renminbi is classified as a managed floating exchange rate currency "with reference to a basket of currencies", which has drawn attention from nations which have freely floated currencies and has become a source of trade friction with Western nations.

Banking

Smart card

A smart card (SC), chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC or IC card), is a card used to control access to a resource. It is typically a plastic credit card-sized card with an embedded integrated circuit (IC) chip. Many smart cards include a pattern of metal contacts to electrically connect to the internal chip. Others are contactless, and some are both. Smart cards can provide perso