Castle Labs Research
Crypto Glossary
The mechanisms behind the markets Castle covers, in a sentence or two each, with a link to the Castle page that goes deeper. Terms marked Explainer have a full page with the mechanics, live numbers and risks.
- Delta-neutral tradealso basis trade, cash-and-carry
- Holding an asset and an equal short perpetual position, so price moves cancel out and the funding rate is the return. Ethena's USDe stablecoin is built on this trade.How funding rates work →Delta-neutral stablecoins and Ethena →
- Fees and revenue
- Fees are what users pay to use a protocol or chain. Revenue is the part the protocol keeps after paying liquidity providers, lenders and other suppliers; for a blockchain, DefiLlama counts as revenue only the fees that are burned or kept by the chain.Crypto revenue rankings →
- Fixed-rate lending
- Loans whose interest rate is set when the loan opens and stays the same until it matures. Almost all onchain lending is variable-rate: Castle's August 2026 report found $28.5 billion in active DeFi loans, nearly all variable, with Fira the largest fixed-rate market at $430 million.Fixed-Rate Lending report →Lending and vaults research →
- Funding ratealso fundingExplainer
- The regular payment between longs and shorts on a perpetual futures contract. When the perp trades above the spot price longs pay shorts, and when it trades below shorts pay longs, which pulls the two prices together.Full explainer →Perp DEX rankings →A Boros funding rates primer →
- HIP-3also builder-deployed perpetualsExplainer
- Hyperliquid's standard that lets a team that stakes HYPE launch its own perpetual futures exchange on Hyperliquid's order book and matching engine. Deployers choose the markets, oracle and settings, and share the trading fees.Full explainer →Onchain commodities tracker →Pre-IPO markets tracker →Making all markets Hyperliquid →
- Holder yield
- A year of holder payouts at the last 30 days' pace, divided by the token's market cap. It compares what protocols return to holders relative to their size; it is not a cash yield, because buybacks and burns reach holders only through the price.Holder yield by protocol →
- Holders revenuealso token holder revenue
- The part of a protocol's revenue that reaches its token holders, through buybacks, burns or payouts to stakers. DefiLlama counts only payouts funded from revenue, not buybacks paid from a treasury.What crypto protocols pay token holders →
- Open interest
- The total value of derivatives positions that are still open. Volume counts every trade, while open interest counts what is still at stake, so it is less affected by traders churning the same position.Perp DEX rankings by open interest →Hyperliquid stats →
- Perpetual futuresalso perps, perpetual swaps
- A futures contract with no expiry date. Instead of settling on a set day, longs and shorts pay each other a funding rate that keeps the contract's price close to the spot price.Perp DEX rankings →How funding rates work →Mapping the Perpetual Trading Ecosystem →
- Perpetual options
- Options with no fixed expiry, paid for with a streaming premium for as long as the position stays open. Panoptic builds them from AMM liquidity; Castle's 2026 options research found these designs still mostly commercially unproven.The Renaissance of Onchain Options →Onchain options research →
- Pre-IPO perps
- Cash-settled perpetual contracts on a private company's expected value. No shares change hands: traders go long or short the company's valuation with margin, unlike pre-IPO tokens, which are issued against shares held in a fund.Pre-IPO markets tracker →Pre-IPO markets are moving onchain →
- Real-world assets (RWAs)also RWAs, tokenised assets
- Tokens that represent assets that exist off-chain, such as Treasury bills, private credit, commodities or reinsurance. Castle's June 2026 report put tokenised RWAs at $28.2 billion, with only about 10% of that active in DeFi.Real-World Assets report →RWA yields tracker →
- Shielded supply (Zcash)
- ZEC held in Zcash's shielded pools, where amounts and addresses are hidden, rather than in transparent addresses. About 4.9 million ZEC, close to 30% of supply, was shielded when Castle's June 2026 privacy report was written.The Full-Stack Privacy Ecosystem →
- Tokenised stocksalso tokenized stocks, stock tokens
- Tokens that track the price of a listed share, usually issued by a company that holds the share or a claim on it. Holders typically get price exposure rather than shareholder rights such as votes, and the terms differ by issuer.Tokenised stocks tracker →
- Vault curatoralso risk curator
- The firm that sets a lending vault's risk rules: which markets it can lend into, the cap on each and its fees. Curators are paid a share of the yield; the largest include Steakhouse Financial, Sentora and Gauntlet.Largest risk curators, ranked daily →Morpho curators and vaults →The Vaultification of Finance →
- Withdrawable liquidity
- The share of a lending vault's assets that depositors could take out right now: idle cash plus what the vault can pull back from the markets it lends into. The rest is lent out and comes back only as borrowers repay.Institutional vaults tracker →