Beginner path · 15 min
Blockchains, wallets, TVL, liquidity, rugpulls — the words people throw around, explained from zero with no buzzwords.
Money has always relied on a trusted middleman — a bank, a payment network, a government. Crypto's pitch: replace that middleman with software running on thousands of computers worldwide. Everyone can verify the books, no one can secretly rewrite them, and you don't need a bank's permission to send value to anyone, anywhere.
Whether you find that pitch exciting or sketchy is up to you. But the underlying technology — the blockchain — is real, and it does what it says.
A blockchainis a public ledger that lives on many computers at once. Every transaction (“Alice sends 0.1 BTC to Bob”) gets written into a “block,” which is chained cryptographically to the previous one. To rewrite history, you'd have to recompute every block since the change — on more than half the computers in the network, before everyone else added the next block. That's the security model: making cheating absurdly expensive.
Digital gold. Designed to be hard money — a fixed maximum supply of 21 million coins, and the only thing the network does is move BTC around.
A programmable blockchain. You can deploy code (smart contracts) that runs whenever someone interacts with it. ETH is the fuel that pays for the computation.
Everything else (Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, BNB, …) is basically a variant of one of these two paradigms — either chasing Bitcoin's “hard money” idea or Ethereum's “programmable” idea, with different trade-offs around speed, fees, and decentralization.
How many coins are actually in the wild right now (in wallets, on exchanges, available to trade).
Circulating + locked or set-aside coins. Higher than circulating for most projects.
The hard ceiling on the number of coins that can EVER exist. Bitcoin: 21M. Ethereum: no hard cap (but very low new issuance).
Price × circulating supply. Same idea as stocks. Bitcoin's market cap is currently >$1T.
The dollar value of all the crypto sitting in a particular smart-contract protocol (e.g., Uniswap, Aave). Proxy for 'how much does the market trust this thing?'
How easy it is to buy or sell a coin without moving the price. High liquidity = thick order book + low slippage.
The transaction fee paid in the chain's native coin. Ethereum gas is paid in ETH; Solana in SOL.
A crypto pegged to a fiat currency (mostly USD). USDC, USDT, DAI. Lets you 'park' on-chain without volatility.
Decentralized Finance. Lending, borrowing, trading happening through smart contracts instead of through banks.
Code deployed to a blockchain that runs automatically when triggered, with no operator to call. Cannot be turned off.
The software (and the private key it holds) that owns your crypto. If you lose the key, the crypto is gone forever.
A way to move crypto from one chain to another (Ethereum → Polygon, etc.). Bridges have been the source of the largest crypto hacks.
A company holds your private keys for you. Coinbase, Binance, CoinDCX accounts. Easy to use; subject to that company's policies, hacks, and (very rarely) bankruptcy.
YOU hold the private keys (a 12-24 word 'seed phrase'). Nobody else can touch your funds. Lose the phrase and the coins are unrecoverable.
| Broker | Good for | What you'll need | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoinbaseRecommended | Easiest first US exchange. Public company, regulated. | SSN, ID, bank login or debit card | ~1.5% on instant buys; ~0.6% on Coinbase Advanced |
| Kraken | More altcoin coverage, lower fees, decent security track record. | SSN, ID, bank link | 0.16-0.26% per trade depending on volume |
| Robinhood Crypto | If you already have Robinhood for stocks, easy to add. Coin selection is narrower. | Existing Robinhood account | Spread baked into price (~0.5-1%) |
| Broker | Good for | What you'll need | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoinDCXRecommended | Largest Indian exchange by volume, decent app, KYC-compliant. | PAN, Aadhaar, bank account | 0.5% per trade + 30% capital-gains tax on profits, 1% TDS on each sale |
| WazirX | Old-school favorite. (Note: faced a 2024 hack — verify current safety status.) | PAN, Aadhaar, bank account | 0.2% per trade + same tax/TDS rules as above |
| ZebPay | Conservative coin selection, KYC-strict, longer-standing. | PAN, Aadhaar, bank account | 0.15-0.25% per trade + same tax/TDS rules |
Not financial advice. This page is educational only — it explains concepts so you can decide for yourself. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or asset.