Looking to start stocking up on Ethereum? You'll come across a few new terms that could leave you scratching your head. If that's the case, take a look at our Ethereum Glossary — it contains everything you could ever need to know.
Block
A collection of Ethereum transactions that occurred during a specific period of time. Think of it as one page in a ledger, with the ledger itself being the Blockchain.
Blockchain
A digital record of every Ethereum transaction that's ever occurred. It's a bit like a massive virtual ledger; all transactions and balances are recorded on it.
Cold Wallet
An Ethereum Wallet that is in cold storage, meaning that it's not connected to the Internet. It's stored offline on a ledger, hard drive, or something similar.
Confirmation
An Ethereum transaction is considered Unconfirmed until it has been included in a Block on the Blockchain, at which point it has one.
A Transaction is considered Confirmed when it has seven Confirmations.
Distributed Ledger
A virtual (public) logbook that tracks all balances and transactions.
Ether
The original Cryptocurrency on the Ethereum Blockchain.
Hash
The definition is two-fold: 1) The unique identifier of an Ethereum transaction; 2) A mathematical function Miners perform on Blocks to make the network secure.
Hot Wallet
An Ethereum Wallet that's located on a device that is connected to the Internet, like a computer, smartphone, or tablet.
Miner
A computer dedicated to processing a transaction. It's tasked with solving a computational process that’s triggered when a transaction is initiated to confirm it’s legitimate.
Paper Wallet
A form of Cold Wallet where Private Keys are printed on a piece of paper, written on a Post-it, or stored on another physical medium.
Transaction
A Blockchain entry that outlines the transfer of Ethereum from one address to another — or rather, the movement of funds from one person to another.
Wei
The smallest unit of Ether, with one Ether comprising of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Wei.