Crypto Derivatives Glossary
46 plain-English definitions of the terms that matter in crypto derivatives data. Each entry links to the live data on our site, so you see the concept, then see it playing out in real markets. Skim the grid below or click into a term for the full explainer.
Quantum-Exposed Bitcoin Supply
Bitcoin held in outputs whose public key is already visible on-chain, so a large quantum computer could in principle derive the private key.
P2PK (Pay-to-Public-Key)
The original Bitcoin output script that pays directly to a public key; most of it dates from 2009-2010 and has never moved.
BIP-360 (P2MR)
A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal for a Merkle-root output type that never puts a public key on-chain until spend, designed as a path to post-quantum signatures.
Q-Day
Shorthand for the day a quantum computer can break today's public-key cryptography, including the elliptic-curve signatures Bitcoin uses.
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC)
Signature and key-exchange schemes designed to resist quantum computers; NIST finalised the first standards in August 2024.
Funding Rate
Periodic payment between perpetual futures longs and shorts that keeps the contract tethered to spot.
Open Interest
Total notional value of all open futures positions at a given moment.
Turkey premium
Gap between the lira price of BTC or ETH on Turkish exchanges and the global price, after removing USDT/TRY.
Basis
Price gap between a futures contract and its underlying spot index.
Mark Price
The exchange's fair-value price for a perpetual, derived from the spot index plus a basis average. Liquidations, unrealized PnL, and funding all use it instead of last price.
Liquidation
Forced closure of a leveraged position when its margin is exhausted.
Basis Points (bps)
1 basis point = 0.01%. We use bps as the canonical unit for funding, basis and premium moves.
Slippage
Difference between the intended execution price and the actual filled price.
Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA)
Buying a fixed USD amount of an asset on a fixed schedule regardless of price.
Altcoin Season (Altseason)
A market phase where altcoins broadly outperform Bitcoin, visible as falling BTC dominance during a rally.
Liquidation Heatmap
A chart estimating where leveraged futures positions would be forcibly closed, shown as price zones colored by intensity.
Long/Short Ratio
The ratio of accounts or positions long versus short a perpetual. Extremes mark crowded trades.
Bitcoin Dominance (BTC.D)
Bitcoin's share of the total crypto market cap. Rising dominance means capital rotating into BTC, falling means altcoins are outperforming.
Altcoin Season Index
The share of top-50 altcoins beating BTC over 90 days. 75+ is altseason, 25 or less is Bitcoin season. We compute it live from Binance perps.
Fear & Greed Index
Alternative.me's 0-100 gauge of market sentiment. We mirror it and blend it into our Retail Euphoria Index.
Pressure Score
Our proprietary 0-100 composite of derivatives stress per symbol.
Smart Money
Binance top-trader positioning, read against the positioning of all accounts.
Liquidation Cascade
A self-feeding burst of forced closures, where each liquidation pushes price into the next cluster.
Funding Rate Arbitrage
Collecting the funding payment by holding offsetting positions so the price move cancels out.
Order Flow Toxicity
How one-sided the aggressive trading is, used as a read on whether informed money is pushing.
VPIN
Volume-Synchronized Probability of Informed Trading, a bucketed measure of order-flow imbalance.
Gamma Exposure (GEX)
Aggregate dealer gamma across the option chain, used to read whether hedging damps or amplifies moves.
DVOL
Deribit's 30-day implied volatility index for Bitcoin, the crypto analogue of the VIX.
Coinbase Premium
The price gap between Coinbase and the global market, read as a proxy for US demand.
Market Impact
How far your own order moves the price, separate from the spread you cross to get filled.
Market Profile
One trading day drawn as time spent at each price, so the prices the market accepted stand out from the ones it passed through.
TPO (time price opportunity)
One mark for each price bucket a 30-minute period traded through; stacked, the marks show how long the market spent at each price.
Point of control (POC)
The price bucket of a day's profile with the most TPO marks: the price the market spent the most time at.
Value area (VAH, VAL)
The price band around the point of control that holds 70% of a day's TPO marks; its top is VAH, its bottom VAL.
Initial balance (IB)
The high and low of a day's first 60 minutes in Market Profile, the range later trade is compared with.
Naked point of control
A point of control that no later closed day has traded through.
Front expiry
The nearest option expiry that carries a meaningful share of open interest; the headline figures on our options page read it.
Max pain
The strike at which the open options of one expiry would pay their holders the least at settlement.
Implied move
The one standard deviation price move the options market prices for a horizon, from at-the-money implied volatility.
Session heatmap
A weekday by UTC hour grid of liquidations that shows when in the week forced closures concentrated.
Base rate
How often an outcome happens across all observations, the figure a filtered statistic has to beat to mean anything.
Continuation share
The share of pattern events after which the price kept moving the way the pattern points.
Swept level
A LiqMap cluster level that the price crossed between one hourly frame and the next.
Thin side
A side of the LiqMap with no cluster within 3% of the price.
Venue share
The part of a total, such as liquidations or open interest, that comes from one exchange.
Counted and shadow venues
Counted venues enter our liquidation totals; shadow venues are recorded but kept out until their feed is verified.