A daily crypto, finance, and AI vocabulary puzzle about reserve backing, execution quality, serving efficiency, and on-chain controls.
Stablecoin Treasury Rails
These terms describe how backing assets are held, reviewed, and used to support a stablecoin.
Treasury BillsCustodianReserve AuditMint-Burn
- Treasury Bills: Treasury bills are short-term government securities often used as conservative reserve assets.
- Custodian: A custodian is the institution that safely holds reserves or other assets on behalf of an issuer or client.
- Reserve Audit: A reserve audit is a review that checks whether backing assets match what a project or firm says it holds.
- Mint-Burn: Mint-burn is a supply-adjustment process where tokens are created or destroyed to keep supply aligned with demand or backing.
Market Microstructure
These terms describe how order types, visible liquidity, and trade size affect execution.
- Limit Order: A limit order executes only at the price you choose or a better one.
- Market Order: A market order trades right away against the best available quotes.
- Price Impact: Price impact is the amount a trade pushes the market price away from where it started.
- Hidden Liquidity: Hidden liquidity is trading interest that is not visible in the public order book.
AI Inference Path
These terms describe the memory and compute tricks that make model serving faster.
- Context Window: The context window is the amount of input text a model can consider at one time.
- KV Cache: A KV cache stores past attention keys and values so a model can generate the next tokens faster.
- Speculative Decoding: Speculative decoding uses a smaller model to propose tokens, then checks them with the larger model.
- Quantization: Quantization reduces numerical precision so models use less memory and often run faster.
Protocol Guardrails
These terms describe permissioning and emergency controls that reduce on-chain risk.
- Allowlist: An allowlist is a set of approved addresses, users, or actions that are allowed to proceed.
- Timelock: A timelock enforces a waiting period before a privileged contract action can take effect.
- Pause Switch: A pause switch lets operators halt selected protocol functions during an incident.
- Role-Based Access Control: Role-based access control gives different permissions to different operator roles.