Glossary
The terms used across these docs, defined once. Each product page assumes these rather than re-explaining them.
Wallets and custody
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Self-custody | You hold the keys to your funds. No platform can move them on your behalf. |
| Account abstraction | Wallet technology that makes wallet login easier without seed phrase management. Technically, separates authentication from transaction authorization, allowing scoped permissions such as session keys. |
| Funding Wallet | Your public receiving address that holds the key for deploying and revoking agents. |
| Agent Wallet | Where trading happens. Created when you allocate to an agent, and scoped so it cannot transfer funds. |
| Embedded wallet (EW) | A user-controlled EOA (External Owned Account) with a private key, created at sign-in through email or Google. |
| Smart wallet (SW) | A contract-based wallet supporting multi-signature, key rotation, and custom transaction logic. |
| Session key | A separate, scoped, revocable key granting an agent permission to trade and nothing else. |
| Delegation | The act of granting an agent its session key to execute a strategy. Requires your explicit approval. |
Trading
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Spot | A market to buy assets "on spot". |
| Perpetual futures (perps) | Futures contracts with no expiry date. Prices are kept together against spot prices through a periodic funding payment. |
| Funding rate | The periodic payment between perpetual longs and shorts on perps. Positive funding rate means longs pay shorts, and viceversa. |
| Contango | A market where futures prices sit above spot prices, which keeps funding positive. |
| Delta neutral | A positioning whose long and short positions offset each other, leaving net price exposure near zero. |
| Spot-perpetual spread | The gap between the spot price and the perpetual price. |
| Open interest (OI) | The total size of outstanding leveraged positions in a perpetual futures market. |
| CVD | Cumulative volume delta: buys minus sells over a period. |
| Liquidation pool | A cluster of leveraged positions that would be force-closed if price reaches a given level. |
| Slippage | The difference between the expected price of a trade and the price actually filled. |
| Drawdown | The decline from a peak balance to a subsequent trough, stated as a percentage. |
| Loss budget | A fixed maximum loss set before entry, from which position size is calculated. |
| Trailing stop | A stop-loss that moves behind price as a trade profits, locking in gains. |
| Backtest | A simulation replaying a strategy over historical data. Not a record of live trading. |
Products and exchanges
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Agent | In Deploy, an autonomous, curated trading strategy that runs from your wallet under a session key. |
| USDC | The stablecoin Deploy Finance agents are funded and settled in. |
| dUSD | Deploy Finance's upcoming synthetic dollar, tokenizing the delta neutral funding strategy. Not launched. |
| sdUSD | The staked, yield-bearing layer of dUSD, held as an ERC-4626 vault share. Not launched. |
| DEX | A decentralized exchange. Agents trade only on whitelisted DEXs. |
| Hyperliquid | The primary exchange for both Deploy Finance agents, Hyperliquid. |