A Crypto Portfolio Tracking Glossary

Portfolio apps assume you already know what they mean. They show you a figure labelled unrealised P&L, or quietly price your LP position at zero, and the vocabulary sits between you and understanding your own money.

These are the terms the rest of this library uses, defined in the way that matters for tracking rather than the way a whitepaper would define them. Each one links to the guide that goes deeper.

What do the money words mean?

Cost basis. What you paid to acquire a holding, including fees, expressed per unit or in total. It is the number every profit calculation subtracts from, which is why a missing cost basis makes a position look like pure gain. See cost basis vs. market value.

Market value. What your holding is worth right now at the current quoted price. It answers a different question from cost basis and the two are frequently confused when a tracker shows both on the same screen.

Unrealised P&L. Profit or loss on positions you still hold, calculated as market value minus cost basis. It changes every second and you have not received any of it. See unrealised vs. realised P&L.

Realised P&L. Profit or loss on positions you have actually sold. Unlike the unrealised kind it is fixed, it is what tax authorities generally care about, and it depends on which lot you counted as sold.

Accounting method. The rule deciding which purchase lot a sale draws from: FIFO, LIFO, average cost and others. Change the method and your realised profit changes while your holdings do not move at all.

Allocation drift. The gap between the weights you intended to hold and the weights price movement has actually given you. A position that doubles takes up more of your portfolio than you chose, without you doing anything. See allocation drift.

Drawdown. How far a holding or a whole portfolio has fallen from its highest point. It is a more honest measure of what an asset put you through than an annual return figure.

What do the market words mean?

Market cap. Circulating supply multiplied by the current price. It measures what the market is pricing the float at, not how much money has gone in, and thin-float tokens produce enormous market caps on trivial volume.

FDV. Fully diluted valuation: the total eventual supply multiplied by the current price. When FDV dwarfs market cap, a large share of the tokens has not been issued yet, and issuing them is a supply event you can see coming. See market cap vs. FDV.

Circulating supply. Tokens currently in public hands, as opposed to total supply, which includes tokens locked in vesting schedules, treasuries and unissued emissions. See supply and unlocks.

Liquidity. How much you can actually buy or sell before you move the price. A quoted price is a claim about a market, and a thin market will not honour that claim in size.

Slippage. The difference between the price you were quoted and the price you got. It is the practical cost of low liquidity and it grows with order size.

Volume. Value traded over a period. It is the confirmation layer for a price move: a large move on negligible volume tells you far less than a smaller move on heavy volume. See reading volume.

Aggregated price. A price computed from several venues weighted by volume rather than taken from one exchange. Different aggregators use different venue sets, which is why two apps can honestly disagree. See different prices in different apps.

What do the wallet and chain words mean?

Public address. The string coins are sent to. Sharing it lets anyone read that address's history and balance, and lets a tracker query it, but confers no ability to spend. See the wallet privacy tradeoff.

Seed phrase. The twelve or twenty-four words from which every private key in a wallet is derived. It is the wallet. No legitimate tracker ever needs it, and any app that asks is stealing from you. See never share your seed phrase.

xpub. An extended public key. It lets a tracker derive every address a Bitcoin wallet will ever generate, so the balance is complete rather than covering only the one address you happened to paste in. It cannot spend.

Associated token account. On Solana, each SPL token you hold lives in its own small account tied to your main address rather than sitting in the address itself. This is why a Solana balance can look empty until the tracker enumerates the token accounts properly. See tracking a Solana wallet.

Gas. The fee paid to have a transaction included on chain, priced in the network's native asset and varying with congestion. It is the reason a small balance can be economically stranded.

Dust. A balance too small to be worth the fee required to move it. Trackers accumulate a lot of it, and it clutters the holdings view without meaningfully affecting the total.

Spam token. A token airdropped into your address without your involvement, often carrying a nominal price from a near-empty liquidity pool. It distorts totals and buries real positions. See spam token filtering.

Honeypot. A token engineered so that buying works and selling does not, usually enforced in the contract. Spam airdrops frequently point at these, and the approval you sign to interact is the actual attack. See fake crypto apps for the related pattern.

Liquid staking token. A receipt token representing coins you have staked plus accrued rewards, tradable while the underlying stays locked. Your wallet holds the receipt, not the original asset, which is why staked value can appear to vanish. See tracking staked assets.

LP position. A liquidity provider position: a claim on two or more assets deposited into a pool, in a ratio that shifts as the pool trades. It is not a fixed quantity of either asset, and simple balance queries often cannot price it.

What do the tracker and connection words mean?

Read-only key. An exchange API key granted permission to read balances and nothing else. It cannot trade and cannot withdraw, which is what makes connecting an exchange to a tracker safe. See read-only API keys.

Withdrawal permission. The API key setting that allows funds to leave an account. No tracker needs it. If a key you generated has it enabled, revoke the key. See revoking an API key.

Manual position. A holding you enter by hand because it has no API and no on-chain address: an OTC purchase, a cold wallet you do not want to expose, an unpriced receipt token. See adding a manual position.

Watchlist. A list of assets you follow without owning. Keeping it separate from holdings is what stops a portfolio screen turning into a market screen.

Sync. One pull of fresh balances from an exchange or chain. Sync frequency and rate limits explain most of the small differences between what a tracker shows and what a venue shows.

Vocabulary is not the point of any of this. But when your total looks wrong, knowing whether the problem lives in the price layer, the balance layer or the cost basis layer is the difference between fixing it in five minutes and giving up on the number entirely. If you have not built the portfolio yet, the twenty-minute setup puts these terms in the order you will meet them.