Slashing is the cryptoeconomic penalty mechanism in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains that forfeits a portion of a validator’s staked collateral when the validator commits a protocol-defined offence.

Restaking is a cryptoeconomic primitive (popularised by EigenLayer, 2023) that lets ETH already staked on Ethereum’s Beacon Chain be reused as economic security for additional services — bridges, oracles, sequencers, data availability layers, app-specific blockchains.

A zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a cryptographic protocol that lets one party (the prover) convince another (the verifier) that a statement is true — without revealing any information beyond the statement’s validity itself.

A rollup is a Layer 2 scaling solution that executes transactions off-chain (on a separate execution layer) but posts compressed transaction data and state commitments back to the Layer 1 chain (typically Ethereum) for security and data availability.

A blockchain oracle is a service that connects smart contracts to external (off-chain) data — prices, weather, sports scores, identity verification results, IoT sensor readings. Smart contracts are deterministic and cannot natively access external APIs; oracles bridge this gap.

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is the value that block producers (miners under PoW, validators under PoS) can extract from a block by including, excluding, or reordering transactions in a way that benefits them — beyond standard block rewards and transaction fees.

An Automated Market Maker (AMM) is the smart contract algorithm that replaces traditional order-book matching with formula-based pricing on decentralised exchanges. AMMs use liquidity pools and a pricing function (bonding curve) to quote prices and settle trades automatically.

A liquidity pool (LP) is a smart contract holding paired token reserves that enable automated, peer-to-contract trading on decentralised exchanges (DEXs). Instead of order books, traders swap against the pool, and prices are set algorithmically by the pool’s bonding curve.

An anti-sandbagging clause bars the buyer in an M&A transaction from claiming indemnification for breach of a representation if the buyer knew, before closing, that the representation was inaccurate.

In M&A, sandbagging refers to the buyer’s right to claim indemnification for breach of a representation even though the buyer knew, before closing, that the representation was inaccurate.