Battle Cryptoby The Compendium Co.
Glossary
Every term you need to read a tape, defined in a sentence or two. No jargon for its own sake, and nothing here is advice.
Aggressor
The side that crossed the spread to make a trade happen. The aggressor is what moves price; the resting side is what absorbs it.
Ask
A standing offer to sell at a stated price. The lowest ask is the best price a buyer can get right now.
Absorption
Heavy aggressive buying or selling that fails to move the price, because someone is quietly filling it from the other side. Usually the most informative thing on a tape.
Bid
A standing offer to buy at a stated price. The highest bid is the best price a seller can get right now.
Bid-ask spread
The gap between the best bid and the best ask. Cross it and you trade immediately; sit inside it and you wait.
Book (order book)
The full stack of resting bids and asks at every price. Depth of book is the real measure of how much an order will move the price.
Candle
A summary of price over a fixed period — open, high, low, close. Useful history; a photograph of a fight that already happened.
CEX
A centralised exchange. It holds your coins and matches orders on its own servers. Coinbase is one.
Depth
How much size is resting near the current price. Deep books absorb large orders; thin books do not.
DEX
A decentralised exchange. On the XRP Ledger the order book is part of the protocol itself, so offers are public and settled on-chain.
Fill
The completed execution of an order, in whole or in part. A large order usually fills at several prices.
Front line
Our name for the current price: the boundary where buy pressure and sell pressure meet and stop each other.
Ground held
Where the price sits inside the session's range. At the top of the range buyers hold everything that was contested; at the bottom, sellers do.
Iceberg
A large order that only shows a small piece on the book at a time, replenishing as it fills. Designed to hide size.
Ledger close
On the XRP Ledger, the moment validators agree on the next version of the whole ledger — every three to five seconds, final on agreement.
Limit order
An order with a price you will not cross. It waits on the book and makes liquidity.
Liquidity
How easily size can trade without moving the price. Made by people willing to wait; consumed by people who are not.
Maker
The trader whose order was already resting when the trade happened. Adds liquidity, usually pays lower fees.
Market order
An order that executes immediately at whatever prices are available. Certainty about time, no certainty about price.
Market impact
How far your own order moves the price against you while it fills.
Momentum
The rate at which the price is currently moving, as opposed to how far it has moved.
Notional
The dollar value of a trade, as opposed to the coin count. Always compare in notional — 12,000 XRP and 0.19 BTC are the same trade.
OfferCreate
The XRP Ledger transaction that places a resting order on the on-chain DEX.
Order flow
The live stream of executed trades with price, size and aggressor side. The record of who ran out of patience.
Partial payment
An XRP Ledger payment where the Amount field is a ceiling rather than what was delivered. Read meta.delivered_amount instead, or you will report transfers that never happened.
A single executed trade as it appears on the tape.
Slippage
The difference between the price you saw and the average price you actually got. The cost of crossing the spread in a thin book.
Spoofing
Placing large orders with no intention of filling them, to influence what others believe. Illegal in regulated markets, common in unregulated ones. Real walls get eaten; fake ones vanish on approach.
Spread
See bid-ask spread. Narrow spreads mean competition; wide spreads mean uncertainty or thin participation.
Taker
The trader who crossed the spread and removed liquidity. Pays the higher fee, and moves the price.
Tape
The running list of executed trades. Reading the tape means reading order flow directly rather than through a chart.
Ticker
A venue's summary feed: last price, recent volume, best bid and ask.
Vacuum
A stretch of the book with little resting size, where a modest order moves the price much further than expected.
Validator
A node that participates in agreeing the next XRP Ledger close. No mining, no block rewards.
Volume (24h)
How much traded on a venue in the last day. Says nothing on its own about direction — split it by aggressor side first.
Wall
A large resting order at one price that stalls the market while it is eaten. What happens after it breaks is usually faster than what happened into it.
Whale
An order large enough to move the price it is executed at. A relative measure — it depends on the depth of the book, not a fixed dollar figure.
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