The recreation of traditional financial services like borrowing and lending in a permissionless manner on decentralised blockchains. Only code and logic decide what happens e.g. how much you can borrow based on your collateral or when a loan is liquidated. Aave and Maker DAO are the two of the earliest and most successful DeFi protocols.

The OG daddy of all dog coins is Doge coin which was started as a joke and was abandoned by its creator. It is known as a meme coin, because its visual identity is based on a Shiba Inu dog from a meme and has no other real utility. It is a fork of Bitcoin so is pretty much identical except it is inflationary and uses a weaker form of cryptographic security. Nevertheless, it has a market cap in the tens of billions of dollars and in true crypto fashion has been copied hundreds if not thousands of times by other dog coins. Elon Musk is known as the Dogefather because of his relentless shilling of Dogecoin on Twitter and other media.

This is basically what you do not want to be. All markets are based on liquidity i.e., the amount of money available in a market. Go to coin gecko or CMC and look at the average 24-hour trading volume on any coin. This gives you an indication of how many coins are bought and sold each day. High liquidity means you can buy or sell easily in the market without the price changing too much. Low liquidity means that if you are selling, there are almost no buyers and even a small sale will result in the price crashing… or in extremely low liquidity there may be nobody to buy your coins. When a whale owns a huge amount of a coin and wishes to cash out… they do not want to dump all coins on the market as the price will crash. The best way to counter this is to create huge buzz and hype and bring a lot of new buyers into the market. This means when the whale dumps their position, there are a lot of new people prepared to buy at the existing price and the price should not drop too much. Often however, shortly after this the manufactured hope will die down and then indeed the price will drop sometimes close to zero for the new holders. However, thanks to the exit liquidity, the whale has secured top dollar for their coins and can watch from the side lines eating popcorn while the plebs get rekt. These new market entrants could cynically be referred to as exit liquidity – the whale wants to exit and needs to find buyers.

ICO is the acronym for Initial Coin Offering. It was the fund raising process of choice of Ethereum based blockchain companies in the 2017 bull cycle. To a large extent, it was reliving the glory days of dot com boom when a business plan and firm handshake could get you millions of dollars in VC funding. A white paper and a website were enough for an ICO. Community members could buy tokens and invest in the project at an early stage. Ethereum had the first ICO and then triggered thousands of copycats. Many were out and out scams. But many of today’s biggest projects were ICOs including Binance, Solana, and many more. The term ICO is a nod to IPOs or Initial Public Offerings in the good old days.

This is the total value of a coin or token or, for NFTs, the total of all assets within a collection based on its current market price. For crypto currency, simply multiply a coin by the (circulating or total depending) token supply. Market cap is useful to get past the psychology of low unit bias, the idea that because a coin has a tiny price it has more potential to increase.