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Definitions are most useful when they send you back to the page where the concept matters. Look up a term, then follow it into a guide or comparison.

AMM (Automated Market Maker)

A smart contract that prices and executes trades algorithmically against a pooled reserve of assets, instead of matching individual buy and sell orders.

CLMM (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker)

An AMM design where liquidity providers deploy capital within a chosen price range instead of across the full price curve.

Covered Call

Selling a call option against an asset you already hold — the strategy behind most 'options yield' vaults, with bounded but real downside.

Cross-Margin (Portfolio Margin)

A margin model where collateral and risk are shared across all of an account's open positions, instead of each position posting its own isolated margin.

Funding Rate

A periodic payment between long and short traders on a perpetual futures contract, keeping its price anchored to the underlying spot price.

Impermanent Loss

The gap between what an AMM liquidity position is worth and what simply holding the same assets would be worth, caused by the pool automatically rebalancing as price moves.

Implied Volatility (IV)

The market's forward-looking estimate of how much an asset's price will move, backed out from current option premiums rather than measured from past price history.

Leverage

Trading with borrowed exposure larger than your posted collateral — it magnifies both gains and losses, and introduces liquidation as a failure mode spot trading doesn't have.

Liquidation

The automatic, forced closure of a leveraged or borrowed position once collateral falls below a required maintenance threshold — usually at a real cost beyond the loss itself.

LST (Liquid Staking Token)

A token representing a staked position, tradeable and usable in DeFi while the underlying asset keeps earning staking rewards.

MEV (Maximal Extractable Value)

Value extracted by reordering, inserting, or excluding transactions within a block, often at the expense of ordinary users.

Open Interest (OI)

The total value of leveraged positions currently open on a perpetual futures market — a depth and conviction signal distinct from trading volume.

Open Interest (Options)

The total number of options contracts currently outstanding on a venue — live risk still on the books, distinct from trading volume.

Option Premium

The price you pay upfront to buy an options contract — the most a simple long buyer can lose, regardless of how the underlying moves.

Oracle

A service that feeds real-world price data onchain — DeFi protocols depend on oracles to mark positions, trigger liquidations, and settle contracts accurately.

Priority Fees

An optional extra fee paid to increase the odds your transaction is processed quickly during network congestion.

Restaking

Using an already-staked asset (or its liquid staking token) as security for additional protocols, earning extra yield for extra risk.

RFQ (Request for Quote)

Asking a network of dealers for a price on a specific trade directly, instead of trading against a public order book — the standard way large options blocks get done.

Slippage

The difference between a trade's expected price and the price it actually executes at, driven by pool depth and market movement.