A daily crypto, finance, and AI vocabulary grouping puzzle for beginners.
Stablecoin Plumbing
These terms describe issuance, redemption, and the mechanisms that support a stablecoin peg.
- Mint: Minting is the process of creating new tokens, typically when new collateral or cash enters a system.
- Burn: Burning removes tokens from circulation, often when users redeem a stablecoin for collateral or cash.
- Collateral: Collateral is an asset pledged to back a loan, position, or stablecoin issuance, reducing counterparty risk.
- Redemption Window: A redemption window is the time and conditions under which a token can be exchanged for its backing asset.
Macro Rates
These terms help connect policy rates and inflation to the pricing of cash and risk assets.
CPIFed Funds RateYield CurveReal Rate
- CPI: CPI (consumer price index) is a common measure of inflation based on a basket of household goods and services.
- Fed Funds Rate: The federal funds rate is a U.S. benchmark policy rate that influences short-term borrowing costs across markets.
- Yield Curve: A yield curve shows interest rates for bonds of different maturities, reflecting expectations for growth and inflation.
- Real Rate: A real rate is an interest rate adjusted for inflation, often approximated as nominal yield minus expected inflation.
On-Chain Risk Controls
These terms describe how protocols manage upgrades, emergencies, and data integrity without promising safety.
- Timelock: A timelock delays privileged changes (like upgrades) to give users time to review and react.
- Emergency Pause: An emergency pause is a mechanism that can temporarily halt certain protocol actions during incidents.
- Oracle: An oracle provides off-chain or cross-system data (like prices) to a smart contract that cannot fetch it natively.
- Oracle Manipulation: Oracle manipulation is an attack where an adversary influences the data a contract uses, such as price feeds, to trigger profitable outcomes.
AI Agent Building
These terms explain how agents are composed, grounded, and protected against common attacks.
- Agent Loop: An agent loop is an iterative cycle where a system observes context, selects an action, executes it, and updates its plan.
- Tool Use: Tool use is when an AI agent invokes external functions or services (like search, code execution, or databases) to complete tasks beyond pure text generation.
- Vector Database: A vector database stores embeddings so an application can retrieve semantically similar documents for tasks like search or RAG.
- Prompt Injection: Prompt injection is an attack where untrusted content is crafted to steer a model into ignoring rules, leaking data, or taking unsafe actions.