Cardano glossary: 35 terms explained

Wallets and addresses

What do the wallet and address words mean?

The words you meet on day one. Definitions follow the official Cardano glossary, checked September 11, 2026.

Ada. The native currency of Cardano. You pay fees in ada, you stake ada, and your ada carries voting power in governance. ADA is its exchange ticker.

Lovelace. The smallest unit of ada. One ada is 1,000,000 lovelace. Protocol settings are quoted in lovelace, so a 155,381 lovelace fee is about 0.16 ada.

Wallet. Software holding your private keys for sending and holding ada and tokens. A self-custody wallet keeps the keys on your device; an exchange account does not. The wallet guide compares them.

Seed phrase. The words a wallet shows at setup, usually 15 or 24 on Cardano. Anyone with that list can move your funds, so it goes on paper, never into a website or a chat.

Payment address. The string starting addr1 that you give someone so they can pay you. CIP-19 defines its structure: network, payment credential and an optional staking credential.

Stake address. The separate address starting stake1 that holds your delegation rights and receives staking rewards. It cannot receive ordinary payments.

Tokens and policy IDs

How are Cardano tokens actually identified?

Cardano handles tokens in the ledger itself, so the naming differs from other chains. From the Cardano docs on native tokens, checked September 11, 2026.

Native token. A token created and tracked by the Cardano ledger itself. As the docs put it, "there is no need to create smart contracts to handle custom tokens." Fuller explainer: what is a Cardano native token.

Policy ID. The 56-character hexadecimal identifier of the minting policy that created a token, and the only reliable way to tell one token from another. For $CATSKY it is 9b426921a21f54600711da0be1a12b026703a9bd8eb9848d08c9d921copy. See the policy ID guide.

Asset name. A fixed label, up to 32 bytes, separating assets minted under one policy, such as "tickets" and "VIPTickets". Wallets display this, which is why a familiar name proves nothing.

Minting policy. The rules governing minting and burning for every asset under one policy. A policy can require a signature, or expire at a deadline so no further tokens can exist. The policy ID is its hash.

Min-ada. The ada that must sit in the same output as your tokens, priced by the utxoCostPerByte parameter. It is not a fee: it belongs to whoever holds the tokens, stays yours while they sit in your wallet, and goes to the recipient with the tokens if you send them away. An output holding only tokens is impossible, so a wallet with no ada cannot move them.

NFT. A native token minted in a quantity of one under a policy that then closes, so no second copy can exist. CIP-25 tells wallets where to read its name, image and attributes.

Transactions and fees

How do transactions and fees work on Cardano?

Cardano uses the UTXO model rather than account balances, which explains most of this vocabulary. From the UTXO explainer and the fee structure page, checked September 11, 2026.

UTXO. Unspent transaction output. Your balance is not a number in an account; it is a set of separate outputs left by earlier transactions. A transaction consumes whole outputs and returns any remainder as change.

eUTXO. Cardano's extended version of that model, where an output can carry data and script logic as well as an address and a value. It is how smart contracts work without shared global state.

Transaction fee. A fixed part plus a per-byte part. On mainnet at epoch 654 that was 155,381 lovelace fixed and 44 lovelace per byte, so a simple transfer costs roughly 0.17 ada. The fees guide works through examples.

Datum. Data attached to an output that a smart contract reads when deciding whether it may be spent. A swap order's details live in a datum.

Redeemer. The data your transaction supplies to tell a contract which action is being attempted. The datum is the state on chain; the redeemer is the instruction you send with it.

Explorer. A site for reading the chain: blocks, transactions, addresses, assets and pools. Cardano Docs lists Cardanoscan, Cexplorer, Pool.pm and AdaStat. The Cardanoscan guide reads one line by line.

Staking and epochs

What do epoch, delegation and saturation mean?

Staking never moves your ada and never locks it. From the official glossary and live protocol parameters, checked September 11, 2026.

Epoch. A period of five days during which the stake distribution is fixed and rewards are calculated. Most staking timing questions are answered in epochs, not hours.

Slot. A one-second window in which a block may be produced. An epoch is 432,000 slots, and most produce no block, so blocks arrive roughly twenty seconds apart.

Stake pool. A node run by an operator that validates transactions and produces blocks. Delegators choose a pool, which does the work and passes rewards back after fees.

Delegation. Assigning your stake to a pool without transferring your ada. The ada stays in your wallet, stays spendable, and is never locked. The staking guide covers a first delegation.

Stake snapshot. A frozen record of every account's delegation taken at an epoch boundary. Rewards come from snapshots, not live balances, which is why a first delegation takes a few epochs to pay.

Saturation. The point past which extra delegation to a pool stops increasing rewards. It follows the target pool count, 500 on mainnet at epoch 654; a saturated pool earns less per ada than the same stake elsewhere.

Rewards. Ada earned by delegators and operators for taking part. It builds up at your stake address, can be withdrawn any time, and has no claim deadline.

Stake address deposit. The refundable ada locked when a wallet first registers a stake address so it can delegate. On mainnet it is 2 ada, returned if that address is later deregistered.

DEXs and DeFi

What do the exchange and liquidity terms mean?

The words on a swap screen. From Minswap's own documentation and the Cardano glossary, checked September 11, 2026.

DEX. A decentralised exchange, where swaps run as on-chain code rather than through a company holding your funds. You keep custody and sign each transaction. The swap guide covers a first trade.

Liquidity pool. A pair of tokens deposited by users that a DEX trades against, instead of matching buyers and sellers in an order book. Providers share the trading fee, often around 0.3% on Minswap, in proportion to their share.

Batcher. An off-chain service that collects swap orders, bundles them and submits one transaction to the chain. That is why a Cardano swap is two transactions and shows as pending for a while. Minswap removed batcher fees in May 2025.

Slippage. The difference between the price you expected and the price you got. The tolerance you set is the limit past which the order will not execute at all, so it cannot fill far worse.

Price impact. The price change caused by your own trade. It depends on your order size relative to the pool's liquidity, so the same order can be trivial in a deep pool and severe in a thin one.

Governance

What are DReps and governance actions?

Cardano has on-chain governance under CIP-1694, live since the Chang hard fork on September 1, 2024 and completed by the Plomin hard fork on January 29, 2025. Deposits below are epoch 654 parameters, checked September 11, 2026.

CIP-1694. The Cardano Improvement Proposal defining on-chain governance: delegate representatives, the Constitutional Committee and formal governance actions. A CIP is a numbered document describing a change or standard.

DRep. A delegate representative that ada holders hand their voting power to, much as they delegate stake to a pool. Registering takes a 500 ada deposit, and one casting no vote for 20 epochs is marked inactive.

Governance action. A formal proposal submitted on-chain for the community to vote on, such as a treasury withdrawal or a parameter change. Submitting one takes a 100,000 ada deposit, returned when it resolves.

Treasury. An on-chain fund fed by a share of transaction fees and newly released ada. Spending needs a withdrawal action that passes a vote, checked against the Cardano Constitution ratified in February 2025.

Sources

Where these definitions come from

All checked September 11, 2026. Quoted numbers are protocol parameters that governance can change.

• The official Cardano glossary for the wallet, staking, DEX and governance terms.
• Cardano docs: native tokens, extended UTXO, fee structure, tracking tools.
• CIP-9 for the Shelley parameters and the 432,000-slot epoch, and CIP-19 for address structure.
• Koios epoch_params for the live epoch 654 values above: fee parameters, deposits and target pool count.
• Minswap docs for batcher, slippage, price impact and liquidity provisioning.

Related: all guides · how to buy Cardano native tokens · Cardano tools directory · claiming tokens on DripDropz