Glossary
One definition per entry, written for reading: what the metric measures, and what it does not say. The matching endpoints are linked from each family of the REST part.
#Derivatives
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Perpetual | A futures contract with no expiry date. It stays glued to the spot price thanks to funding, which replaces the natural convergence of a dated contract. |
| Funding | The periodic payment between long and short positions that keeps the perpetual close to spot. Positive, the longs pay the shorts: the market is leaning to the upside. |
| Cumulative funding | The sum of the settlements over twenty-four hours. It says what a position held for a day really cost, where the instantaneous rate says only the cost of one settlement. |
| APR | The annualised funding rate: the rate of one window multiplied by the number of settlements in a year. An order of magnitude, not a guaranteed yield. |
| Open interest | The number of open contracts, expressed in value. It measures the capital committed, not the activity: a high volume with no progression of open interest signals round trips. |
| Basis | The gap between the futures price and the spot price. Positive, it is called contango, a sign of appetite for leverage on the upside. Negative, backwardation. |
| Long/short ratio | The share of accounts positioned to the upside. Global-account flavour: each account weighs one, whatever its size. It is a measure of crowd positioning, not of capital. |
| Liquidation | The forced closing of a position whose margin no longer covers the loss. The side indicated is that of the liquidated position: a liquidation of longs is a forced sale. |
#Flow and order book
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Taker | The side that consumes liquidity by crossing the order book, as opposed to the maker who provides it. It is the taker’s aggressiveness that moves the price. |
| CVD | Cumulative volume delta: the running sum of buy volume minus sell volume at market. Its slope says who is pushing; its divergence from the price says when the push is running out of breath. |
| Volume delta | The difference between buy and sell volume over a window. The CVD is its cumulation. |
| VWAP | The volume-weighted average price. Two versions here: cumulative since midnight UTC, or specific to a window. It serves as an execution benchmark. |
| Order book imbalance | (bids − asks) / (bids + asks) over the aggregated depth. Positive, the buyers dominate. It is a state, not a transaction: it can disappear without a single order being executed. |
| Crossed order book | A best buyer above a best seller. Impossible on a single venue, normal between venues: it is a real arbitrage window. |
| Inter-venue premium | The price gap of one venue against the cross-venue reference, in basis points. Any pair is derived from the difference of two premiums. |
| Liquidation heatmap | The price zones where potential liquidations concentrate. The attraction combines density and distance: density divided by the distance squared. |
#Options
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Implied volatility | The volatility that the price of options assumes for the future. It measures what the market pays to hedge, without saying in which direction. |
| At the money | The strike price closest to the current price of the underlying. Implied volatility there is the reference of the surface. |
| Put/call ratio | Puts divided by calls, in open interest or in volume. Above 1, downside hedging dominates. |
| Max pain | The strike price at which the total value of the options coming to expiry would be the lowest. A statistical centre of gravity, not a forecast. |
| Greeks | The sensitivities of an options position: delta to the price, gamma to the variation of the delta, vega to volatility, theta to time. Recomputed here under a single convention, which makes them addable across venues. |
| Expiry | The expiration date of a contract. Large expiries concentrate open interest and weigh on the underlying as the unwinding approaches. |
#On-chain
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| MVRV | Market capitalisation over the value at which the coins last moved. Above 3.5, history speaks of euphoria; below 1, the market trades under its average acquisition cost. |
| NVT | Capitalisation over the on-chain transaction volume: a price-to-sales ratio applied to a network. Its version smoothed over ninety days is less noisy. |
| Active addresses | The number of addresses that sent or received over the period. The most direct measure of the usage of a chain. |
| Miner stress | Miner revenues over difficulty. When it collapses, the least efficient miners sell their reserves, a selling pressure invisible in the order book. |
| Mempool | The queue of transactions waiting for confirmation. How full it is determines the fees. |
| Difficulty adjustment | The periodic recalibration that brings the average time between blocks back towards its target. It follows variations in computing power with a lag. |
| Burn | The share of fees destroyed rather than paid to the validators. When it exceeds issuance, the supply contracts. |
| Net issuance | Issuance minus burn. Negative, the network destroys more than it creates. |
| Staking ratio | The share of the supply locked up to secure the network. It reduces the supply available for sale by as much. |
| TVL | The total value locked in the decentralised protocols of a chain. A measure of adoption, sensitive to the price variations of the assets deposited. |
#Macro and market
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Net liquidity | The central bank balance sheet, minus the Treasury account, minus the reverse repos. An approximation of the liquidity actually available for risk assets. |
| Yield curve slope | The gap between a long rate and a short rate. Negative, it has historically preceded slowdowns. |
| Inflation breakeven | Expected inflation deduced from the gap between nominal and index-linked bonds. |
| Dominance | The share of one asset in the total capitalisation of the crypto market. Its rise signals a rotation towards that asset. |
| FDV | The fully diluted valuation: the maximum supply multiplied by the price. It says what the asset would be worth if every token already existed. |
| Fear & Greed | A sentiment index from 0 to 100 for the whole crypto market. Extreme one way or the other, it is most often read against the crowd. |
| ETF fundamentals | The figures filed by the issuers: shares issued, net asset value, assets held. Quarterly, because that is the rhythm of regulatory filings. |
#Platform vocabulary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Aggregation only | The contract of the API: no response names its trading venue. One single exception, the inter-venue spreads, which would make no sense otherwise. |
| bucket | The start of a time window, never its end. An hourly candle with bucket 11:00 covers 11:00 to 12:00. |
| is_closed | True: the value is final and immutable. False: it is provisional, two successive calls can differ. |
| live | The parameter that exposes the current period on the bucketed latest-value routes. Without it, only closed windows are served. |
| venue_count | The number of venues that contributed to a given row. It varies from one window to the next. At null, it means “unknown”, never “none”. |
| coverage | The expected coverage of a field, and the effect of an absence: additive, the figure is mechanically too low; weighted, the level stays valid but may be biased. |
| unavailable | The reason for an empty field: not_applicable, the phenomenon does not exist here; no_api_key, the source is not plugged in; no_data, a real absence over the window. |
| partial | Present on the snapshot. True when part of the response could not be built: the field concerned carries an error, the others are still served. |
| data_type | The name of the type returned, carried by the envelope. It lets you route a response without relying on the path called. |
| Warm-up | The number of candles an indicator needs before it can publish its first value. It is added to the number of results asked for in the ceiling rule. |