Crypto Trading Glossary
Plain English explanations of the market signals Zash watches for you. Each term covers what it is, why it matters, and how traders actually use it.
Funding Rate
The funding rate is a periodic payment between long and short traders in perpetual futures markets. It keeps the perpetual contract price anchored to the spot price: when the rate is positive, longs pay shorts, and when it is negative, shorts pay longs.
Open Interest
Open interest (OI) is the total number of outstanding derivative contracts, such as perpetual futures, that have not been settled. Rising open interest means new money entering positions; falling open interest means positions closing.
Liquidation
A liquidation happens when a leveraged trading position is forcibly closed by the exchange because the trader’s margin can no longer cover the losses. In crypto futures, large clusters of liquidations can cascade, accelerating the price move that triggered them.
RSI (Relative Strength Index)
RSI, the Relative Strength Index, is a momentum indicator that measures the speed and size of recent price changes on a scale from 0 to 100. Readings above 70 are conventionally called overbought and readings below 30 oversold.
Volume Spike
A volume spike is a sudden jump in trading volume far above the recent average for that market. It signals that something changed: news broke, a large player entered, or a technical level gave way.
Confluence (Trading)
Confluence in trading means several independent signals pointing the same way at the same time, for example an oversold RSI, negative funding and a volume spike appearing together. Setups with confluence carry more weight than any single indicator alone.
Prediction Market
A prediction market is a market where people trade on the outcome of real world events, such as elections or interest rate decisions. The price of each outcome reflects the probability the crowd assigns to it, so odds moves are a live read on collective expectations. Polymarket is the largest crypto-based prediction market.
Whale Tracking
Whale tracking means monitoring the trading activity of very large market participants, called whales, whose positions are big enough to move prices. On transparent venues like Hyperliquid, every position is on-chain and can be followed wallet by wallet in real time.