Glossary
The plumbing, defined. 29 terms from Span's essays and briefs, each linked to the piece that explains it in full.
A
AI Capex
The capital expenditure wave behind the AI buildout: datacenters, chips, power, and cooling. It is large enough to behave as a macro force, absorbing the marginal investment dollar and competing with every other use of capital. Read more: № 029, Capital Has Somewhere Else to Be →
C
Collateral Velocity
How fast collateral can be reused across the system. Tokenized collateral moves in minutes rather than days, which frees balance sheet: the same Treasury can do more work in the same day. Read more: № 010, Crypto Is Becoming Part of the Financial System, Quietly →
Custody
Safekeeping of client assets. In crypto, custody economics were shaped less by technology than by an accounting rule: while SAB 121 forced custodied crypto onto bank balance sheets, systemically important banks stayed out. When it was rescinded, they came in. Read more: № 010 →
D
DATCO
Digital asset treasury company: a listed company whose primary business is holding a crypto asset, funded by issuing stock and credit against it. The marginal buyer in several 2026 tapes, and a new transmission channel between equity markets and crypto. Read more: Span AI, May 20 2026 →
Duration
Sensitivity of an asset's price to interest rates. Long-duration assets, from 30-year bonds to high-multiple tech stocks, trade as one family when yields move, which is why sector selloffs sometimes share no fundamentals, only duration. Read more: Span AI Markets Monitor, Aug 23 2026 →
DVP
Delivery versus payment: settlement where the asset and the cash move at the same instant, or not at all. Smart-contract settlement makes DVP native rather than reconciled after the fact. Read more: № 010 →
E
Eurodollars
Dollar deposits held outside the US banking system, the twentieth century's great offshore dollar market. Stablecoins repeat the pattern: offshore dollar claims, backed by Treasuries, growing outside the regulated perimeter until they matter to it. Read more: № 003, Eurodollars 2.0 →
Extrapolation
Work that pushes knowledge past the edge of the recorded corpus: the new material, the unprecedented trade, the theorem without an answer key. Rare, valuable, and the part of knowledge work AI has not automated. Read more: № 032, Interpolation vs Extrapolation →
F
Fiscal Dominance
The regime where government financing needs constrain monetary policy: the central bank cannot tighten freely because the sovereign's interest bill will not allow it. Watch the share of receipts consumed by interest. Read more: Span AI, Aug 22 2026 →
Forward Guidance
A central bank steering markets by describing its future path. When guidance is withdrawn, every meeting reprices on data alone, and volatility migrates from the statement to the tape. Read more: Span AI, Jun 20 2026 →
G
GENIUS Act
The 2025 US federal framework for payment stablecoins: 100% reserve backing in cash and short-term Treasuries, and a prohibition on treating custodied crypto as balance-sheet liabilities of the bank. The rulebook that made stablecoins investable infrastructure. Read more: № 010 →
I
Interpolation
Work that matches a new situation against the existing codified body of knowledge: the diagnosis, the contract review, the audit. Hard, well paid, and exactly what large language models mechanize first. Read more: № 032 →
Intraday Liquidity
Cash available within the day, not just at close. Settlement uncertainty forces banks to hoard it; instant settlement releases it. One of the quietest and largest economic gains from faster rails. Read more: № 010 →
M
Market Structure
The rules, venues, and plumbing that determine how trading actually happens: who can access what, at what speed, with what protections. Regulation is market structure by other means. Read more: № 020, Regulation as Market Structure →
mNAV
Market capitalization divided by net asset value, the premium a DATCO trades at over the assets it holds. Above 1, issuing stock to buy the asset is accretive; approaching 1, the flywheel stalls and can invert. Read more: Span AI, May 30 2026 →
O
On-Ramp Problem
Professions train juniors through years of supervised interpolation, and that is the work AI absorbed first. The training ground for judgment is disappearing while the demand for judgment grows. Read more: № 032 →
P
Prime Brokerage
The bundle of services (custody, financing, margin, settlement) that lets funds trade at scale. DeFi lending protocols reproduce that bundle in code, without the credit officer. Read more: № 007, DeFi as Automated Prime Brokerage →
R
Realized Volatility
Volatility actually delivered by prices over a window, as opposed to what options imply. Bitcoin's realized volatility has compressed as its market cap grew: the store-of-volatility function fading toward store of value. Read more: № 030, Store of Volatility →
Rehypothecation
Reusing collateral that was posted to you as collateral for your own obligations. It multiplies liquidity in good times and correlations in bad ones; on-chain, the chain of claims is at least visible. Read more: Span AI, Aug 22 2026 →
Repo
Repurchase agreements: short-term loans collateralized by securities, the daily liquidity backbone of modern markets, with volumes over $4 trillion a day. Distributed-ledger repo became blockchain's first killer app inside traditional finance. Read more: № 010 →
RWA
Real-world assets, tokenized: Treasuries, funds, credit, and commercial paper represented on-chain so they can settle and serve as collateral at blockchain speed. The convergence lane where TradFi and DeFi actually meet. Read more: № 008, TradFi/DeFi Convergence →
S
SAB 121
The SEC staff bulletin (2022) that forced custodied crypto onto custodians' balance sheets, pricing banks out of the business. Its rescission by SAB 122 in January 2025 is the single rule change behind institutional custody's arrival. Read more: № 010 →
Sector Rotation
Capital moving between equity sectors rather than in or out of the market. The tell is in what leads and what lags: when the worst sectors share duration rather than fundamentals, the bond market is running the tape. Read more: Span AI Markets Monitor, Jun 26 2026 →
Smart Contract as Counterparty
In DeFi, the counterparty to your trade is code: it cannot renege, but it also cannot exercise discretion. Counterparty risk becomes code risk, and due diligence becomes an audit. Read more: № 022, Code as Counterparty →
Stablecoin Float
The total outstanding supply of stablecoins, effectively a pool of offshore dollars whose reserves sit in Treasuries. The float is a structural Treasury bid that grows with crypto activity, not with US fiscal policy. Read more: № 003 →
Stagflation
Slowing growth with sticky inflation, the combination that traps a central bank between its two mandates. The signal is rarely one print; it is the pattern across labor, prices, and the long end. Read more: № 019, The Stagflation Signal →
Store of Volatility
Bitcoin's current structural function: the deep, always-open instrument where the system parks and prices risk. Not yet a store of value, and the distinction is the point. Read more: № 030 →
Structured Credit
Debt sliced into tranches with different risk and payment priority, from CLOs to asset-backed paper. Tokenized settlement gives the machinery a new home with faster reconciliation and visible collateral. Read more: № 017, Structured Credit Finds a New Settlement Layer →
T
Tokenized Treasuries
US government debt represented on-chain, so it can move at blockchain speed and serve as pristine collateral in on-chain markets. The bridge asset of the whole convergence story. Read more: № 010 →
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