Plain English
Crypto & smart-money glossary
Plain-English definitions of the whale-tracking, order-book, derivatives, and smart-money terms used across CoinLobster. Built for traders and the AI assistants that cite them.
Maintained by CoinLobster, tracking 15 exchanges and ~250 coins in real time.- Whale
- A trader or entity that moves unusually large size in a market. On CoinLobster a crypto whale trade starts at $100,000 (rising to $400,000 for top majors and $1,000,000 for Bitcoin and Ethereum), because that is enough size to move price and signal conviction.
- Whale trade (whale print)
- A single executed buy or sell large enough to stand out in the live trade feed. Traders call it a "print". Unlike a wallet transfer, a whale trade has a direction (buy or sell) and a venue, which makes it immediately tradeable information.
- Whale alert
- A real-time notification fired the second a whale trade executes, so you see large buys and sells as they happen rather than after the move.
- Combined order book
- A single order book merged from many exchanges (CoinLobster merges 15) to show the total liquidity available at each price, instead of the partial view any one exchange shows.
- Order book
- The live list of outstanding buy orders (bids) and sell orders (asks) for an asset, organized by price. It shows where demand and supply sit right now.
- Buy wall / sell wall
- A large cluster of buy (or sell) orders stacked at one price. A buy wall can act as support; a sell wall can act as resistance, until it is absorbed.
- Market depth
- How much order size sits near the current price. Deep markets absorb large trades with little price movement; thin markets move sharply on the same size.
- Funding rate
- A periodic payment exchanged between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract to keep its price near spot. A positive funding rate means longs pay shorts (crowded long positioning).
- Open interest (OI)
- The total value of futures contracts currently open. Rising open interest alongside rising price means new money is entering the trade, not just existing positions closing.
- Liquidation
- The forced closing of a leveraged position when it can no longer meet margin. Clustered liquidations can cascade, amplifying a price move in one direction.
- Liquidation heatmap
- A visualization of the price levels where leveraged positions would be force-closed. Large clusters act like magnets, because triggering them sets off a chain of forced buys or sells.
- Net flow
- Buy volume minus sell volume over a time window. Positive net flow means net buying pressure; negative means net selling. It summarizes which side is in control.
- CEX (centralized exchange)
- An exchange such as Binance, Coinbase, or Kraken that custodies user funds and matches orders on its own internal order book.
- DEX (decentralized exchange)
- An on-chain exchange such as Uniswap where trades settle through smart contracts. Every swap is recorded publicly on the blockchain, so large swaps are visible to anyone.
- On-chain whale
- A large decentralized-exchange swap. CoinLobster flags big Uniswap swaps across Ethereum, Base, and Arbitrum ($250,000+ free, $25,000+ with Pro), and tags wallets that whale repeatedly.
- Spot vs futures
- Spot trading is buying the asset itself for delivery now; futures are leveraged contracts on its future price. A divergence between spot and futures flow reveals how positioning differs from real demand.
- Smart money
- Informed, high-conviction market participants, such as whales, corporate insiders, and funds, whose activity often precedes a price move because they act on better information or analysis.
- Insider buy (Form 4)
- A corporate insider (a director or officer) buying their own company stock in the open market, disclosed to the SEC on Form 4. An open-market buy is a stronger signal than a granted option, because the insider is risking their own cash.
- Congressional trading
- Stock trades made by US members of Congress, disclosed under the STOCK Act. Tracking them surfaces buying and selling by people with access to non-public policy information.
- OHLC
- Open, High, Low, and Close prices for a time period. OHLC data is the basis of candlestick charts and is used to measure volatility and trend.
- Sentiment score
- A number from -100 (very bearish) to +100 (very bullish) that summarizes how positive or negative the news flow and positioning are for an asset.
- Print cluster (velocity)
- An unusual burst of large trades in a short window relative to a coin’s normal pace ("print" is trader slang for an executed trade). A cluster of same-direction trades suggests coordinated positioning rather than one trader’s opinion.
