Glossary
38 Solana and DeFi terms in one line each. Deeper explanations live in the Academy.
- Account
- Every piece of state on Solana: wallets, token balances, programs, pools.
- Aggregator
- A router that splits your trade across many venues for the best price.
- Alpenglow
- Solana's new consensus protocol, live Oct 21, 2026. Finality around 150ms.
- AMM
- Automated market maker. A pool that prices trades with a formula.
- APR / APY
- Yearly yield without / with compounding.
- Bonding curve
- A formula that raises a new token's price as people buy.
- Bundle
- A group of transactions that execute together or not at all, used with Jito.
- CLMM
- Concentrated liquidity market maker. LPs choose a price range.
- CLOB
- Central limit order book. Bids and asks matched by price.
- Collateral
- Assets you lock to borrow or trade with leverage.
- DLMM
- Meteora's bin-based concentrated liquidity design.
- Epoch
- A period (about a day now) after which staking rewards are paid.
- Finality
- The point after which a transaction can't be reversed.
- Funding rate
- Periodic payment between longs and shorts that keeps perps near spot.
- Health factor
- How far a loan is from liquidation. Below 1 means liquidated.
- Impermanent loss
- What an LP loses versus simply holding when prices move.
- Lamport
- The smallest unit of SOL. One SOL is a billion lamports.
- Leader
- The validator scheduled to produce blocks for a slot.
- Liquidation
- Forced sale of collateral when a loan or position gets too risky.
- LST
- Liquid staking token. Staked SOL you can still use.
- LTV
- Loan-to-value. How much you borrowed versus your collateral.
- MEV
- Value captured by ordering transactions, including sandwich attacks.
- Mint address
- A token's unique ID. The only reliable way to identify it.
- Oracle
- A feed that brings outside prices onchain.
- Perps
- Perpetual futures. Leveraged positions with no expiry.
- Points
- Off-chain scores apps give users, often converted into a token later.
- Price impact
- How much your own trade moves the price.
- Priority fee
- An optional tip that helps your transaction land faster.
- PT / YT
- Principal and yield tokens. PT locks a fixed rate; YT earns the floating yield.
- Rent
- A refundable SOL deposit that keeps an account alive.
- RPC
- The server your wallet talks to to read and send transactions.
- RWA
- Real-world asset: treasuries, stocks, credit or insurance brought onchain.
- Slippage
- The worst price you'll accept before a trade cancels.
- Slot
- A 200ms window in which one leader can produce a block.
- Sybil
- One person posing as many wallets to farm rewards.
- TGE
- Token generation event. Launch day for a token.
- TVL
- Total value locked. Assets deposited in a protocol.
- Validator
- A computer that votes on blocks and secures the network.
