An educational crypto, finance, and AI vocabulary puzzle about price formation, secured borrowing, agent workflows, and model-serving efficiency.
Market Microstructure
These terms cover quoted prices, market gaps, and what happens when size meets thin liquidity.
- Bid: A bid is the highest price a buyer is currently willing to pay.
- Ask: An ask is the lowest price a seller is currently willing to accept.
- Spread: The spread is the gap between the bid and ask prices.
- Slippage: Slippage is the difference between expected and executed price when liquidity changes.
Credit and Collateral
These terms cover secured borrowing, lender protection, forced top-ups, and failure to repay.
- Collateral: Collateral is an asset pledged to secure a loan or position.
- Haircut: A haircut is the discount applied to collateral value for risk management.
- Margin Call: A margin call is a request for more collateral after losses reduce coverage.
- Default: Default is failure to meet a debt or contract obligation.
Agent Orchestration
These terms cover planning, tool selection, stored context, and structured tool invocation.
- Planner: A planner is the part of an agent that breaks a task into steps.
- Router: A router sends a task to the right tool or model.
- Memory: Memory is stored context or facts an agent can reuse later.
- Function Calling: Function calling is a structured way for a model to invoke a tool.
Compute Economics
These terms cover hardware, reuse, bundling requests, and keeping systems busy.
- GPU: A GPU is a specialized chip used for fast parallel computation.
- Cache: A cache stores data or output so it can be reused without recomputing it.
- Batching: Batching groups requests together so a system can process them more efficiently.
- Parallelism: Parallelism is the practice of running multiple operations at the same time.