The vocabulary

Glossary

Eighty terms, each in two or three sentences, each linked to the pages that use it. Search the list or jump by letter.

Search the glossary

A

Actuator: The motor, gearbox or hydraulic unit that moves a robot joint. Humanoids use dozens; their cost, torque and efficiency decide what a robot can lift and how long its battery lasts. The hand is the hard part
Airdrop: Free distribution of tokens to wallets that meet a condition, often past use of a protocol. Airdrops reward early users and create a first set of holders, and many of those holders sell on day one. Token Unlock Simulator
All-time high: The highest price an asset has ever traded at. Drawdown from the all-time high is a common measure of how deep a bear market is. The anatomy of a crypto cycle
Altcoin: Any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin. The word covers everything from Ethereum to a coin created this morning, and says nothing about quality. Markets
ASIC: Application-specific integrated circuit: a chip built for one job. Bitcoin miners are ASICs that compute one hash function; custom AI accelerators are ASICs for matrix multiplication. What the electricity buys · Mining Profitability

B

Bitcoin: The first and largest cryptocurrency, launched in January 2009, with a supply capped at 21 million coins and new coins issued to miners at a rate that halves every four years. The four-year clock · What is the halving?
Block: A batch of transactions added to a blockchain, linked to the previous block by a hash. Bitcoin adds a block roughly every ten minutes, Ethereum every twelve seconds. How a blockchain works
Block reward: The new coins plus fees a miner or validator receives for adding a block. On Bitcoin the new-coin part is 3.125 bitcoin since April 2024. What is the halving?
Blockchain: A ledger kept as a chain of blocks, copied across many computers and extended by a rule everyone can verify. Its point is that no single party can rewrite it. How a blockchain works
Bridge: Software that moves tokens between two blockchains by locking them on one side and issuing a claim on the other. Bridges hold large balances and have been the target of the biggest thefts in crypto. What is a layer 2?

C

Cobot: Collaborative robot: an arm designed to work next to people without a safety cage, with limited force and speed. Cobots are the entry point of automation for small factories. The robot that works next to you · Automation Payback
Cold storage: Keeping private keys on a device that never connects to the internet, such as a hardware wallet or a piece of paper in a safe. The safest way to hold coins and the easiest way to lose them if the backup is missing. Wallets, keys and custody
Consensus: The rule by which a network of computers agrees on the next block. Proof of work and proof of stake are the two dominant rules. Proof of work and proof of stake
Context window: The amount of text a language model can consider at once, measured in tokens. Larger windows allow whole documents or code bases in one prompt and cost more per request. How large language models work · AI Inference Cost
CRISPR: A gene-editing method that uses a guide RNA and an enzyme to cut DNA at a chosen place. The first approved CRISPR therapy treats sickle cell disease. From a bacterial defence to an approved medicine
CUDA: Nvidia’s programming platform for its graphics processors, released in 2007. It is the reason most AI software runs on Nvidia chips first and on everything else later. Everything runs on somebody else’s wafer · Why AI needs GPUs
Custody: Who holds the keys to an asset. Self-custody means you do, and are responsible; custodial means an exchange or a bank does, and you hold a claim against them. Not your keys, and the other half of that sentence

D

Data center: A building of servers, power and cooling. AI data centers are measured in megawatts of electrical capacity, and the largest campuses under construction are planned in gigawatts. What is a data center? · Data Center Power
DeFi: Decentralised finance: lending, trading and derivatives run by smart contracts instead of companies. Users keep custody, the code sets the terms, and there is nobody to call when something goes wrong. What is DeFi? · Where does the yield come from?
Degrees of freedom: The number of independent ways a robot can move, counted per joint. A human hand has more than twenty; robot hands with comparable freedom are among the hardest parts to build. The hand is the hard part
Difficulty: A number that sets how hard it is to find a valid bitcoin block, adjusted every 2,016 blocks so that blocks keep arriving every ten minutes as hashrate changes. Mining Profitability
Dollar-cost averaging: Buying a fixed amount at fixed intervals regardless of price. It removes the timing decision and buys more units when prices are low. Savings Plan Simulator
Dominance: Bitcoin’s share of the total crypto market capitalisation. Rising dominance usually means money is leaving smaller coins for the largest one. Markets
Drawdown: The fall from a peak to the following trough, in percent. Bitcoin has had several drawdowns of more than seventy percent; technology indices have had drawdowns above fifty. Savings Plan Simulator

E

Edge AI: Running a model on the device itself, a phone, a car or a robot, rather than in a data center. It saves latency, bandwidth and privacy at the cost of model size. The model in your pocket
Embodied AI: Artificial intelligence that controls a physical body, sensing and acting in the world. The current wave of humanoid robots is embodied AI with a large model as the brain. The brain moved before the body did
ETF: Exchange-traded fund: a fund whose shares trade on a stock exchange. Spot bitcoin ETFs hold the coins in custody and let investors own bitcoin exposure in an ordinary brokerage account. What is a spot ETF? · The wrapper that changed the buyer
Ethereum: The second-largest blockchain, launched in 2015, with a built-in programming language for smart contracts. It moved to proof of stake in 2022 and hosts most stablecoins, DeFi and tokenized assets. The computer that cut its power bill by 99 percent

F

Fear and greed index: A daily crowd-mood score from 0 to 100 built from volatility, volume, social activity, dominance and search trends. Extreme readings often mark turning points, but not on a schedule. Markets · The anatomy of a crypto cycle
Fiat: Money that a government declares legal tender, not backed by a commodity. Every major currency has been fiat since 1971. Purchasing Power
Fine-tuning: Training an existing model further on a smaller, specific dataset to change its behaviour or knowledge. Cheaper than training from scratch, and how most specialised models are made. How large language models work
Foundry: A factory that manufactures chips designed by others. TSMC in Taiwan makes the majority of the world’s advanced AI chips, which is why it appears in every discussion of supply risk. Everything runs on somebody else’s wafer
Fusion: Energy from joining light atomic nuclei, the process that powers the sun. Private companies and public labs are building pilot plants; net electricity to the grid remains a goal, not a result. How close is fusion, really

G

Gas: The fee paid to execute a transaction or a smart contract on Ethereum and similar chains, priced in the chain’s own token and rising with demand. What is a layer 2?
GPU: Graphics processing unit: a chip with thousands of small cores built for parallel arithmetic. Neural networks are parallel arithmetic, which is why GPUs became the engines of AI. Why AI needs GPUs

H

Hallucination: A confident, fluent statement by a language model that is false. It happens because models predict plausible text, not verified facts, and it is the reason model output needs checking. Models that think before they answer
Halving: The programmed cut of Bitcoin’s block reward by half every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years. The fourth halving was in April 2024; the next is expected in 2028. What is the halving? · The four-year clock
Hardware wallet: A small device that holds private keys offline and signs transactions without exposing them. The standard tool for self-custody. Wallets, keys and custody
Hash: A fixed-length fingerprint of any data, produced by a function that is easy to compute and impossible to reverse. Blocks are linked by hashes; miners search for hashes below a target. How a blockchain works
Hashrate: The number of hash computations per second a miner or a whole network performs. Bitcoin’s network hashrate is measured in exahashes per second and has risen for most of its history. Mining Profitability
HBM: High-bandwidth memory: stacked memory chips placed next to an AI processor to feed it data fast enough. HBM supply has been a bottleneck for accelerators since 2023. Everything runs on somebody else’s wafer
Humanoid robot: A robot with a human-like body: two legs, two arms, hands, a torso. The form is chosen so that the machine can use spaces, tools and tasks built for people. What is a humanoid robot? · Humanoids leave the lab

I

Inference: Running a trained model to get an answer, as opposed to training it. Inference is where most AI electricity and cost will go as models are used by billions of people. AI Inference Cost

L

Large language model: A neural network trained on very large amounts of text to predict the next token. With enough scale it writes, summarises, translates, codes and reasons in a limited way. How large language models work
Layer 2: A network that processes transactions off the main chain and posts compressed results back to it, inheriting the main chain’s security at a fraction of the fee. What is a layer 2? · The second floor
Lidar: A sensor that measures distance with laser pulses and builds a three-dimensional map of surroundings. Most robotaxis use it alongside cameras and radar; one large carmaker famously does not. The driverless mile is now a business
Liquidity: How much of an asset can be bought or sold without moving the price. Thin liquidity is why small tokens can rise or fall by half in a day. The anatomy of a crypto cycle

M

Market capitalisation: Price multiplied by circulating supply. It is a size measure, not the money that went in; a coin can have a large market cap on very little trading. Markets
MiCA: Markets in Crypto-Assets, the European Union regulation for crypto issuers and service providers, applied in full since 30 December 2024. It licenses exchanges and custodians and sets reserve rules for stablecoins. Europe wrote the rulebook first
Mining: Adding blocks to a proof-of-work chain by finding a hash below a target, and being paid new coins for it. On Bitcoin, mining is an industrial business run on specialised chips and cheap electricity. What the electricity buys
Multimodal: A model that handles more than one kind of input or output, such as text, images, audio and video. Robot models are multimodal by necessity: they see, hear and act. The brain moved before the body did

N

Node: A computer that runs the software of a blockchain, holds a copy of the ledger and checks every block. Anyone can run one; that is what makes the rules enforceable. How a blockchain works

O

Oracle: A service that brings outside data, such as a price or a weather reading, onto a blockchain so that smart contracts can use it. Chainlink is the largest oracle network. What is DeFi?

P

Parameters: The numbers inside a neural network that training adjusts. Model size is quoted in parameters; frontier models have hundreds of billions to trillions of them. How large language models work
Perovskite: A family of crystalline materials used in a new generation of solar cells. Layered on silicon they raise efficiency past the limit of silicon alone; durability is the open problem. The cheapest way to make sunlight into electricity
Private key: The secret number that lets its holder spend coins from an address. Whoever has the key has the coins; there is no reset button. Wallets, keys and custody
Proof of stake: A consensus rule where validators lock up the chain’s own token and are chosen to propose blocks in proportion to their stake, losing part of it if they cheat. Ethereum has used it since 2022. Proof of work and proof of stake
Proof of work: A consensus rule where miners spend electricity to find a valid block hash, so that rewriting history costs more than it earns. Bitcoin’s rule since 2009. Proof of work and proof of stake
PUE: Power usage effectiveness: total data center power divided by the power that reaches the computers. A PUE of 1.2 means twenty percent overhead for cooling and conversion. Data Center Power

Q

Quantum computer: A machine that computes with quantum bits that can hold superpositions. Prototypes exist; error correction at useful scale is the milestone the field is working towards. Quantum computing, without the hype and without the sneer

R

Real-world asset: A token that represents an asset outside the blockchain, such as a treasury bill, a fund share, a bond or a building. Tokenized treasuries were the first category to reach billions. What is tokenization? · Putting the boring assets on chain
Reasoning model: A language model trained to produce a chain of intermediate steps before its answer, trading more compute at inference for better results on hard problems. Models that think before they answer
Robotaxi: A ride service with no driver in the car. Operating in a growing list of cities since the early 2020s, first with a safety driver and then without. The driverless mile is now a business
Rollup: The most common type of layer 2: it executes many transactions off-chain and posts a compressed proof or the data to the main chain. What is a layer 2?

S

Seed phrase: Twelve or twenty-four words that encode a wallet’s private keys. Anyone who reads them owns the wallet; anyone who loses them loses it. Wallets, keys and custody
Sim-to-real: Training a robot in a physics simulation and transferring the result to the physical machine. It makes millions of trial hours cheap, and the gap between simulation and reality is the central engineering problem. The brain moved before the body did
Small modular reactor: A nuclear reactor built in a factory in units of a few hundred megawatts or less, meant to be cheaper and faster to license than a large plant. Several designs are under review; few are built. Nuclear, in units small enough to finance
Smart contract: A program stored on a blockchain that runs when its conditions are met and cannot be stopped by any single party. Tokens, exchanges and lending protocols are smart contracts. What is DeFi?
Solid-state battery: A battery with a solid electrolyte instead of a liquid one, promising higher energy density and lower fire risk. Pilot production exists; mass production keeps moving a year or two out. The battery that keeps being two years away
Spot price: The price for immediate delivery, as opposed to a futures price for delivery later. Gold spot is quoted per troy ounce in dollars. Markets
Stablecoin: A token designed to hold a fixed value, usually one dollar, backed by reserves of cash and treasury bills. Stablecoins are the settlement currency of the crypto market. What is a stablecoin? · The quiet giants
Staking: Locking tokens to help secure a proof-of-stake network in return for rewards paid in the same token. Rewards, lock-ups and penalties vary by chain. Staking Yield

T

Teleoperation: A human controlling a robot remotely, often through a headset and gloves. It is how many humanoid demo videos are made and how training data for robot models is collected. Humanoids leave the lab
Token: A unit of value or rights recorded on a blockchain: a coin, a claim on an asset, a right to vote, a ticket. The word also names the chunks of text a language model reads and writes. What is a token?
Tokenization: Issuing a token that represents an existing asset, so that it can be held and moved on a blockchain. Funds, treasuries, bonds, stocks and property are being tokenized in stages. What is tokenization?
Transformer: The neural network architecture from the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need. Every large language model and most image and robot models are transformers. How large language models work
Troy ounce: The unit of precious metal prices: 31.1035 grams, slightly more than an ordinary ounce. Gold and silver prices are quoted per troy ounce. Markets · Live Converter

V

Validator: A participant in a proof-of-stake network that proposes and checks blocks in return for rewards, with its stake at risk. Ethereum has hundreds of thousands of them. Proof of work and proof of stake
Vesting: The schedule on which locked tokens or shares become available to their holder, usually after a cliff and then in monthly steps. Unlocks are potential selling pressure. Token Unlock Simulator

W

Wafer: The thin disc of silicon on which chips are made, usually 300 millimetres across. A single advanced wafer costs tens of thousands of dollars and holds dozens of AI processors. Everything runs on somebody else’s wafer

Y

Yield: The return an asset pays as income: staking rewards, lending interest, dividends. In crypto the word covers very different risks, from a treasury bill to an unaudited farm. Where does the yield come from?

Z

Zero-knowledge proof: A way to prove that a statement is true without revealing the data behind it. Used by some layer 2 networks to prove batches of transactions and by identity systems to prove age without a birth date. What is a layer 2?