# Crypto Derivatives Glossary

46 derivatives terms in plain words; 6 of them carry a live reading of the metric they define. Each term has its own rendition at /md/glossary/<slug>.

Source: https://bykaranteli.com/glossary · attribute to ByKaranteli and quote the timestamp.

| Term | Rendition | Definition |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Altcoin Season (Altseason) | /md/glossary/altcoin-season | A market phase where altcoins broadly outperform Bitcoin, visible as falling BTC dominance during a rally. |
| Altcoin Season Index | /md/glossary/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. |
| Base rate | /md/glossary/base-rate | How often an outcome happens across all observations, the figure a filtered statistic has to beat to mean anything. |
| Basis | /md/glossary/basis | Price gap between a futures contract and its underlying spot index. |
| Basis Points (bps) | /md/glossary/basis-points | 1 basis point = 0.01%. We use bps as the canonical unit for funding, basis and premium moves. |
| BIP-360 (P2MR) | /md/glossary/bip-360 | 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. |
| Bitcoin Dominance (BTC.D) | /md/glossary/btc-dominance | Bitcoin's share of the total crypto market cap. Rising dominance means capital rotating into BTC, falling means altcoins are outperforming. |
| Coinbase Premium | /md/glossary/coinbase-premium | The price gap between Coinbase and the global market, read as a proxy for US demand. |
| Continuation share | /md/glossary/continuation-share | The share of pattern events after which the price kept moving the way the pattern points. |
| Counted and shadow venues | /md/glossary/counted-and-shadow-venues | Counted venues enter our liquidation totals; shadow venues are recorded but kept out until their feed is verified. |
| Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) | /md/glossary/dca | Buying a fixed USD amount of an asset on a fixed schedule regardless of price. |
| DVOL | /md/glossary/dvol | Deribit's 30-day implied volatility index for Bitcoin, the crypto analogue of the VIX. |
| Fear & Greed Index | /md/glossary/fear-and-greed | Alternative.me's 0-100 gauge of market sentiment. We mirror it and blend it into our Retail Euphoria Index. |
| Front expiry | /md/glossary/front-expiry | The nearest option expiry that carries a meaningful share of open interest; the headline figures on our options page read it. |
| Funding Rate | /md/glossary/funding-rate | Periodic payment between perpetual futures longs and shorts that keeps the contract tethered to spot. |
| Funding Rate Arbitrage | /md/glossary/funding-arbitrage | Collecting the funding payment by holding offsetting positions so the price move cancels out. |
| Gamma Exposure (GEX) | /md/glossary/gamma-exposure | Aggregate dealer gamma across the option chain, used to read whether hedging damps or amplifies moves. |
| Implied move | /md/glossary/implied-move | The one standard deviation price move the options market prices for a horizon, from at-the-money implied volatility. |
| Initial balance (IB) | /md/glossary/initial-balance | The high and low of a day's first 60 minutes in Market Profile, the range later trade is compared with. |
| Liquidation | /md/glossary/liquidation | Forced closure of a leveraged position when its margin is exhausted. |
| Liquidation Cascade | /md/glossary/liquidation-cascade | A self-feeding burst of forced closures, where each liquidation pushes price into the next cluster. |
| Liquidation Heatmap | /md/glossary/liquidation-heatmap | A chart estimating where leveraged futures positions would be forcibly closed, shown as price zones colored by intensity. |
| Long/Short Ratio | /md/glossary/long-short-ratio | The ratio of accounts or positions long versus short a perpetual. Extremes mark crowded trades. |
| Mark Price | /md/glossary/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. |
| Market Impact | /md/glossary/market-impact | How far your own order moves the price, separate from the spread you cross to get filled. |
| Market Profile | /md/glossary/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. |
| Max pain | /md/glossary/max-pain | The strike at which the open options of one expiry would pay their holders the least at settlement. |
| Naked point of control | /md/glossary/naked-poc | A point of control that no later closed day has traded through. |
| Open Interest | /md/glossary/open-interest | Total notional value of all open futures positions at a given moment. |
| Order Flow Toxicity | /md/glossary/order-flow-toxicity | How one-sided the aggressive trading is, used as a read on whether informed money is pushing. |
| P2PK (Pay-to-Public-Key) | /md/glossary/p2pk | The original Bitcoin output script that pays directly to a public key; most of it dates from 2009-2010 and has never moved. |
| Point of control (POC) | /md/glossary/point-of-control | The price bucket of a day's profile with the most TPO marks: the price the market spent the most time at. |
| Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) | /md/glossary/post-quantum-cryptography | Signature and key-exchange schemes designed to resist quantum computers; NIST finalised the first standards in August 2024. |
| Pressure Score | /md/glossary/pressure-score | Our proprietary 0-100 composite of derivatives stress per symbol. |
| Q-Day | /md/glossary/q-day | Shorthand for the day a quantum computer can break today's public-key cryptography, including the elliptic-curve signatures Bitcoin uses. |
| Quantum-Exposed Bitcoin Supply | /md/glossary/quantum-exposed-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. |
| Session heatmap | /md/glossary/session-heatmap | A weekday by UTC hour grid of liquidations that shows when in the week forced closures concentrated. |
| Slippage | /md/glossary/slippage | Difference between the intended execution price and the actual filled price. |
| Smart Money | /md/glossary/smart-money | Binance top-trader positioning, read against the positioning of all accounts. |
| Swept level | /md/glossary/swept-level | A LiqMap cluster level that the price crossed between one hourly frame and the next. |
| Thin side | /md/glossary/thin-side | A side of the LiqMap with no cluster within 3% of the price. |
| TPO (time price opportunity) | /md/glossary/tpo | One mark for each price bucket a 30-minute period traded through; stacked, the marks show how long the market spent at each price. |
| Turkey premium | /md/glossary/turkey-premium | Gap between the lira price of BTC or ETH on Turkish exchanges and the global price, after removing USDT/TRY. |
| Value area (VAH, VAL) | /md/glossary/value-area | The price band around the point of control that holds 70% of a day's TPO marks; its top is VAH, its bottom VAL. |
| Venue share | /md/glossary/venue-share | The part of a total, such as liquidations or open interest, that comes from one exchange. |
| VPIN | /md/glossary/vpin | Volume-Synchronized Probability of Informed Trading, a bucketed measure of order-flow imbalance. |

## Related

- https://bykaranteli.com/methodology
- https://bykaranteli.com/brief
- https://bykaranteli.com/indices

Everything in one fetch: https://bykaranteli.com/llms-full.txt