Glossary
Crypto & affiliate glossary
24 terms, weighted toward the vocabulary that decides what you are actually paid and what a platform actually owes you — the words most crypto glossaries skip.
A
Affiliate disclosure
A statement identifying the commercial relationship between a publisher and the products it writes about.
AML
Anti-Money Laundering: the monitoring and reporting obligations a regulated platform carries beyond initial identity checks.
APR and APY
Two ways of expressing a yield: APR excludes the effect of compounding, APY includes it.
C
Chargeback
A reversal of a payment that can claw back commission already credited to you.
Cold storage
Keeping private keys on a device that has never been connected to the internet.
Cookie window
The period after someone clicks your link during which a resulting sign-up is still credited to you.
CPA
Cost per acquisition: a flat one-off payment for each qualifying sign-up, regardless of what that user does afterwards.
Custodial wallet
A wallet where a third party holds the private keys, so your balance is a claim on that…
G
I
K
M
N
Negative carryover
A term under which a negative commission balance is carried into the following month instead of being reset…
Non-custodial wallet
A wallet where you alone hold the private keys, giving you direct control and sole responsibility.
P
Payout minimum
The balance you must accumulate before a program will pay you anything.
Proof of reserves
A published attestation that a platform holds assets matching customer balances at a point in time.
R
Revenue share
A commission model paying you a percentage of the revenue your referred users generate, for as long as…
Rug pull
A fraud in which a project’s operators withdraw the pooled funds and abandon it.
S
Seed phrase
A sequence of words that regenerates every private key in a wallet, and therefore controls all its funds.
Slashing
A penalty that destroys part of a validator’s staked assets for misbehaviour or prolonged downtime.
Slippage
The difference between the price you expected and the price your order actually filled at.
Sponsored placement
Paid positioning that is bought rather than earned, and which must be labelled as such.
Spread
The gap between the best buy price and the best sell price on a market at a given…
Stablecoin
A crypto asset designed to hold a steady value against a reference currency, usually the US dollar.