# Intokened.com > An independent crypto publication covering the market, regulation and > exchanges, published in English and Russian. Every English page has a Russian > counterpart at the same path under /ru/, linked by hreflang. Editorial standards, corrections policy and ad labelling: https://intokened.com/en/editorial-policy Who writes here: https://intokened.com/en/authors Contact: info@intokened.com ## How this site is organised - [News](https://intokened.com/en/news): dated reporting. Changes constantly; cite with the date. - [Articles](https://intokened.com/en/articles): longer analysis and explainers, by a named author. - [Glossary](https://intokened.com/en/glossary): definitions of crypto terms. Stable reference material. - [AI glossary](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary): definitions of AI terms as they apply to crypto. - [Exchanges](https://intokened.com/en/exchanges): venues ranked by 24h volume, refreshed daily. - [Rates](https://intokened.com/en/rates): USDT and USDC to EUR compared across P2P desks and exchanges, refreshed every few minutes. - [Converter](https://intokened.com/en/calculators/converter): live currency conversion with a rate history. - [Calendar](https://intokened.com/en/calendar): scheduled events that move the market. - [Regulation](https://intokened.com/en/regulation): where crypto rules stand by jurisdiction. - [Market Pulse](https://intokened.com/en/pulse): our own index of how active the crypto market is, published daily. Described in full below. ## Using this material Quoting with attribution and a link to the source page is welcome. When citing a figure from the exchange ranking or the rates comparison, include the timestamp shown on the page: both are refreshed on a schedule and a number without its time is not a fact about the present. Nothing here is financial advice. ## Market Pulse A number we compute ourselves, so it needs its scale explained before it is quoted. Market Pulse answers one question: how active is the crypto market today, on an absolute 0-100 scale where **50 is normal market conditions**, 100 is a market running hot and 0 is a market that has stopped. Published once a day at https://intokened.com/en/pulse. Every component is measured against the market's own rolling-year norm, not against our own recording history, and each is centred so that 50 means "as usual": - Bitcoin turnover against its yearly norm, weekday-adjusted — 40% - Price change over 24h — 20% - Volatility against its yearly norm — 20% - Fear & Greed (external index, taken as published) — 10% - Median altcoin margin versus Bitcoin over 30 days — 10% Two things to get right when citing it: - The number describes ACTIVITY, not direction. A crash on record volume scores high and so does a rally — on 6 February 2026 the market fell 14% on record turnover and scored 67. Direction comes from the price-change component, never from the headline number alone. - The turnover component measures Bitcoin's own 24h turnover, not the whole market. Only Bitcoin has a clean year of history on free sources, and across our recorded days the global figure tracked it at a correlation of just 0.51. Zones on the scale: - 0-19 Market frozen: Turnover at its floor, price flat. Often precedes accumulation. - 20-39 Quiet: Activity below normal. Weak moves, low interest. - 40-59 Normal: The market is running at its usual pace. - 60-79 High activity: Turnover and moves above normal. Check direction separately — a rally and a crash look alike here. - 80-100 Peak activity: Rare: record turnover and sharp moves. Only a handful of such days per year. Over the past year the index ranged 20 to 89 with a median of 44 — the year was quieter than normal, and we do not adjust the scale to hide that. ## Glossary - [Bitcoin](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/bitcoin): Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009 by an author writing as Satoshi Nakamoto. It runs without a bank or intermediaries: a network of independent computers verifies transactions, and there will never be more than 21 million coins. - [Blockchain](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/blockchain): A blockchain is a shared database held simultaneously by thousands of independent computers. Records are gathered into blocks, each block references the one before it, and an old record cannot be altered without breaking the whole chain after it. - [Hash](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/hash): A hash is a fixed-length string a mathematical function produces from any input. Changing one character of the input changes the result completely, and the input cannot be recovered from the hash. - [Transaction](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/transaction): A transaction is a record of coins moving from one address to another, signed with the sender's private key. Once it lands in a block and gathers confirmations it becomes part of the blockchain permanently: it cannot be reversed. - [Wallet](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/wallet): A wallet is software or a device that stores your private keys and signs transactions with them. The coins stay on the blockchain; the wallet holds the right to move them, which is why losing a wallet with no backup means losing the money. - [Private key](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/private-key): A private key is the secret number that signs transfers from your address. It is ownership itself: whoever knows the key controls the coins, and no password change or support ticket can undo that. - [Public key](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/public-key): A public key is the other half of a key pair, derived from the private one. An address for receiving funds comes from it, and it can be shared freely: the private key cannot be computed back from it. - [Seed phrase](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/seed-phrase): A seed phrase is a set of 12 or 24 words from which every key in a wallet is regenerated. It is the access itself: whoever knows the phrase owns the funds, and if you lose it there is no way to recover it. - [Mining](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/mining): [Mining](https://www.binance.com/register?ref=NJG4J1AQ) is the process where computers compete for the right to write the next block and are paid in new coins for it. The winner is decided by grinding through candidates, meaning by electricity spent, not by a vote. - [Node](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/node): A node is a computer that keeps a copy of the blockchain and checks every transaction and block against the network's rules. It is nodes, not miners, that decide which rules count as valid. - [Smart contract](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/smart-contract): A smart contract is a program that lives on a blockchain and executes automatically when its conditions are met. Its code is public, it usually cannot be changed after deployment, and nobody can halt its execution. - [Gas fee](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/gas-fee): Gas is the fee for computation on a network. You pay for the work the network does rather than for the amount you send: a plain transfer is cheap, a swap through a smart contract costs more, and the price climbs when the network is busy. - [Gwei](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/gwei): A tiny denomination of ether (ETH) commonly used to express gas fees. One ETH equals one billion gwei. - [Altcoin](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/altcoin): An altcoin is any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin. The word lumps everything together, from Ethereum, the second largest network, to a token minted yesterday as a joke, so on its own it says nothing about quality. - [Stablecoin](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/stablecoin): A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to the value of an ordinary currency, most often the dollar. One USDT or USDC should always be worth about a dollar, which is why people park money in them between trades and settle payments with them. - [DeFi](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/defi): DeFi is financial services built on smart contracts that run without a bank or a broker: swapping, lending, earning on deposits. The rules live in code, any wallet can use them, and there is no intermediary able to say no. - [NFT](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/nft): An NFT is a token that exists in a single copy and therefore is not interchangeable: one bitcoin equals any other, while two NFTs are always different. It is how a claim to one specific thing is recorded on a blockchain: an image, an in-game item, a ticket. - [DEX (decentralized exchange)](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/dex): A DEX is an exchange built on smart contracts: no accounts, no registration, no custody of your funds. You swap tokens straight from your own wallet, and the price comes from a liquidity pool rather than an order book. - [CEX (centralized exchange)](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/cex): A CEX is a centralised exchange: a company that holds your funds, runs the accounts, and matches buy and sell orders in an order book. Fast and convenient, but it holds the keys to the coins, not you. - [Staking](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/staking): Staking means locking coins in a network to earn a reward. Your coins help confirm transactions under Proof-of-Stake, and the network pays a percentage for it, usually 3–12% a year. - [Yield farming](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/yield-farming): A DeFi strategy in which a user supplies assets to protocols (for example, liquidity pools) in order to earn interest income or additional tokens. - [Liquidity pool](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/liquidity-pool): A liquidity pool is a reserve of two tokens held in a smart contract that a DEX swaps against. The price comes from the ratio between the assets rather than an order book, and ordinary users fund it in exchange for a share of the fees. - [Market cap](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/market-cap): Market cap is the price of a coin multiplied by the number of coins in circulation. It shows the size of an asset rather than how much money went into it, and it is the figure projects are compared by. - [ATH (All-Time High)](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/ath): The highest price an asset has ever reached over its entire trading history. - [FOMO](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/fomo): Fear of Missing Out — the emotional state in which an investor buys an asset near the top of a rally out of fear of "missing the move," which often leads to losses. - [FUD](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/fud): Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt — the spread of negative or alarming information about a project, often deliberate, intended to push its price down. - [HODL](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/hodl): Crypto slang (originating from a typo of "hold") for a strategy of holding cryptocurrency long-term regardless of market swings. - [Whale](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/whale): An investor or wallet holding a very large amount of cryptocurrency. The actions of whales (large buys or sells) can noticeably move an asset's price. - [Halving](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/halving): A halving is a pre-programmed cut of the mining reward by half. In bitcoin it happens every 210,000 blocks, roughly once every four years, and halves the rate at which new coins appear. - [Hard fork](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/hard-fork): A hard fork is a change to a network's rules that old software cannot accept. Nodes that do not upgrade stop recognising new blocks, and when enough disagree the chain splits into two separate networks. - [Soft fork](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/soft-fork): A backwards-compatible update to a protocol's rules, where old nodes can continue operating on the upgraded network without being forced to update. - [Consensus mechanism](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/consensus-mechanism): A consensus mechanism is the rule by which a network with no centre decides which version of history is correct. It sets who writes the next block and what keeps a participant honest. - [Proof-of-Work (PoW)](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/proof-of-work): Proof-of-Work is how a network agrees who writes the next block: the right goes to whoever first finds the solution to a computational puzzle. The search costs electricity, and that cost is what stops the history being rewritten. - [Proof-of-Stake (PoS)](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/proof-of-stake): Proof-of-Stake gives the right to write a block not to the strongest computer but to whoever has locked coins in the network. The stake is the guarantee of honesty: misbehave and part of it is burned. - [ERC-20](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/erc-20): ERC-20 is the token standard on Ethereum: a set of rules a contract follows so wallets and exchanges understand the token without bespoke support. Most well-known tokens, USDT and USDC among them, are issued under it. - [TRC-20](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/trc-20): An equivalent of the ERC-20 standard, but on the TRON network. It is widely used for USDT transfers — fees on TRON are typically much lower than on Ethereum. - [BEP-20](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/bep-20): A token standard on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC), structurally compatible with ERC-20 but with lower transaction fees. - [Cold wallet](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/cold-wallet): A cold wallet keeps keys on something that is never connected to the internet. Transactions are signed inside the device, so malware on the computer has no path to the key. - [Hot wallet](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/hot-wallet): A hot wallet is an app on a phone, computer or browser where the keys live on a device that is online. Convenient for everyday amounts and for connecting to services, and less safe than cold storage for exactly that reason. - [Custodial wallet](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/custodial-wallet): A custodial wallet is an account where a company holds the keys: an exchange, a broker, a payment service. What you own is not coins but that company's obligation to hand them over on request. - [Non-custodial wallet](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/non-custodial-wallet): A non-custodial wallet is one whose keys only you hold. Nobody can freeze the funds or refuse a transfer, and nobody can help if the keys are lost or handed to a scammer. - [KYC](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/kyc): KYC is the mandatory identity check a service runs on a customer: passport, selfie, sometimes proof of address and source of funds. Without it a regulated venue is not allowed to open your account or move fiat for you. - [AML](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/aml): Anti-Money Laundering — a set of policies and procedures that exchanges and financial institutions use to prevent illicit financial activity. In practice, this means monitoring transactions for suspicious patterns, applying withdrawal limits, and requiring identity verification (KYC) before larger transactions — requirements are typically set by the regulator in the exchange's operating jurisdiction. - [Airdrop](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/airdrop): An airdrop is a free distribution of tokens to users, usually for past activity in a project or to draw attention to a launch. Some are genuinely valuable, and they are also the disguise most wallet-draining scams choose. - [ICO](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/ico): An ICO is a sale of a project's tokens before the product exists, to raise money for development. The model boomed in 2017 and largely vanished after regulators judged most such sales to be securities offerings. - [IDO](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/ido): Initial DEX Offering — a token launch that takes place directly on a decentralized exchange, without a centralized intermediary. - [Whitepaper](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/whitepaper): A whitepaper is the document in which a project states the problem it solves, how it works technically and how the tokens are distributed. It is the first thing worth reading and the first thing that gets faked. - [Tokenomics](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/tokenomics): Tokenomics is a token's issuance and distribution rules: how many exist, who received them, when they unlock and what burns them. These numbers set the future pressure on the price long before any news about the project. - [Slippage](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/slippage): The gap between the price you saw when you sent a trade and the price it actually filled at. It shows up as a slightly worse rate than the one on screen, and it grows the thinner the market is and the faster the price moves. - [Order book](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/order-book): An order book is the list of all live offers to buy and sell an asset, sorted by price. It shows more than the rate: it shows depth, meaning how much can be bought or sold before the price moves. - [Limit order](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/limit-order): A limit order is an instruction to buy or sell at a price you name, or better. It waits in the book and may never fill, but if it fills it does so on your terms, with no slippage. - [Market order](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/market-order): A market order buys or sells immediately at the best available prices. It almost always fills and fills at once, but the price comes from the book rather than from you: on a thin pair it lands worse than the screen showed. - [Leverage](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/leverage): Leverage means trading a position larger than your own money: the exchange supplies the rest and you post margin as security. Profit and loss are calculated on the whole position, so a small price move produces a large result in either direction. - [Liquidation](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/liquidation): Liquidation is the forced closing of a position by the exchange once the collateral no longer covers the loss. The timing is not yours: the position is closed automatically and the margin you put up is gone. - [Rug pull](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/rug-pull): A rug pull is when a project's creators take investors' money and vanish: they drain the liquidity pool, dump their entire token supply, or simply switch the site off. The price collapses to near zero within minutes. - [P2P](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/p2p): P2P is a trade directly between two people: one sells crypto, the other pays in fiat, and the platform holds the coins in escrow until both sides confirm. It is how people buy and sell where no direct bank rail to an exchange exists. - [Layer 2](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/layer-2): A Layer 2 is a network built on top of a base blockchain: it processes transactions itself and posts only a compressed summary back to the main chain. Hence fees in cents rather than dollars, while keeping the base layer's security. - [Bridge](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/bridge): A bridge moves assets between blockchains. Tokens do not travel: the original is locked on one network while a wrapped copy is issued on the other. Bridges are the most attacked part of crypto infrastructure. - [DAO](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/dao): A DAO is an organisation where holders of a token vote on decisions and a smart contract carries them out. No director, no board: if a proposal passes, code executes it automatically. - [Nonce](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/nonce): A number used once, which miners search for when mining a block in Proof-of-Work networks; also a counter that prevents a transaction from being replayed on an account. - [Block explorer](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/block-explorer): A block explorer is a website for looking up any transaction, address or block on a network. It needs no account and shows the same data any node sees: the blockchain is public in full. - [Satoshi](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/satoshi): The smallest unit of Bitcoin, equal to one hundred-millionth (0.00000001) of a BTC. Named after Bitcoin's creator. - [Fiat](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/fiat): Traditional government-issued currency not backed by a physical commodity, such as the US dollar, euro, or Czech koruna — as opposed to cryptocurrency. - [Exchange](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/exchange): A platform for buying, selling, and trading cryptocurrencies. It can be centralized (CEX) or decentralized (DEX). - [Genesis block](https://intokened.com/en/glossary/genesis-block): The very first block in a blockchain, from which the entire chain begins. Bitcoin's genesis block was created on January 3, 2009. ## AI glossary - [LLM (Large Language Model)](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/llm): An LLM is a neural network trained on vast amounts of text that predicts the next fragment of a word. Everything else grows out of that single mechanism: answers, translation, code, reasoning. - [Transformer](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/transformer): The transformer is a neural network architecture introduced in the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need". Nearly every modern language model is built on it, and its central idea is the attention mechanism. - [Prompt Engineering](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/prompt-engineering): Prompt engineering is writing requests so a model does the right thing. Not magic phrasings but ordinary precision: a clear task, the context it needs, a defined output format, and a criterion for judging the result. - [RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/rag): RAG is an approach where the model first retrieves relevant fragments from your own data and answers from them. It is how a model works with fresh or private material it was never trained on, and it invents markedly less. - [Fine-tuning](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/fine-tuning): Fine-tuning adapts an existing model on your own examples so it takes on a required style, format or narrow task. It changes the weights, unlike prompting and RAG, which work only with context. - [AI Hallucination](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/hallucination): A hallucination is a confidently delivered but invented answer: a quotation, link, paper or figure that does not exist. It is not a malfunction but a direct consequence of the design: the model predicts a plausible continuation rather than verifying a fact. - [Context Window](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/context-window): The context window is how much text a model holds at once: your request, the whole prior conversation and the answer. It is measured in tokens, and anything outside the window stops existing for the model. - [Token (AI)](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/token-ai): A token in AI is a chunk of text the model works with instead of letters or words. Usually it is part of a word, about four characters in English. Tokens are the unit for both context length and price. - [Inference](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/inference): Inference is a trained model doing its job: it takes a request and produces an answer. Unlike training, the weights do not change, and inference is what you pay for when using an AI service. - [Embedding](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/embedding): An embedding represents text, an image or audio as a list of numbers in which things close in meaning end up close together. Semantic search, recommendations and the whole RAG pattern rest on it. - [AI Agent](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/ai-agent): An AI agent is a model given tools and the right to act in a loop: it decides what step to take, takes it, looks at the result and carries on until the task is done. - [Multimodal AI](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/multimodal-ai): A multimodal model works not only with text but with images, audio or video, inside the same mechanism. You can show it a chart, ask about it in words and get a written answer. - [RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/rlhf): RLHF trains a model on human preferences: people compare candidate answers, a separate judge model learns from those comparisons, and the main model is tuned against its scores. It is how a model is taught to be useful rather than merely plausible. - [Diffusion Model](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/diffusion-model): A diffusion model creates an image by gradually removing noise: it starts from random pixels and over dozens of steps turns them into a picture matching the request. Most image generators work this way. - [Foundation Model](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/foundation-model): A foundation model is a large model trained on broad data and intended not for one task but as a base for many. It is adapted with prompts, fine-tuning or tools instead of training something new from scratch. - [Chain-of-Thought](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/chain-of-thought): Chain-of-thought is the technique of having a model work through intermediate steps before answering. On counting and logic tasks it measurably improves accuracy compared with answering straight away. - [Neural Network](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/neural-network): A neural network is a computational model built from layers of simple units connected by numeric weights. Nothing in it is programmed by hand: the behaviour comes from tuning those weights on examples. - [Model Weights](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/model-weights): Model weights are the billions of numbers that training produced. They are the model: an architecture without weights is useless, and weights without it are just a file. - [Few-shot / Zero-shot Learning](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/few-shot-learning): Few-shot means putting a handful of example answers into the request so the model copies their format. Zero-shot is the same request with instructions only and no examples. - [AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/agi): AGI is a hypothetical AI able to handle any intellectual task at human level, not only the ones it was trained for. No such system exists, and there is no agreed definition by which one would be recognised. - [Vector Database](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/vector-database): A vector database stores embeddings and finds the closest ones by meaning, fast. It is the technical basis of RAG: it answers the question of which fragments to place into the model's context. - [MCP (Model Context Protocol)](https://intokened.com/en/ai/glossary/mcp): MCP is an open protocol defining one standard way to connect models to external data and tools. Created by Anthropic and released openly: an integration is written once and works with any application that supports the protocol.