The six you need first
| word | what it means here |
|---|---|
| DeFiLoops | This product. You describe a strategy in plain words, it works out the steps, shows you the list, and runs it after you approve. It never holds your money. |
| network | One of the blockchains this runs on: Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum or HyperEVM. The same account address works on all four, and moving money between them takes real time. |
| your account | An account on the blockchain that belongs to you and holds your money. It is not an account with us. The app and the tools call it your operating address. |
| the agent | The thing that reads your sentence, writes the plan, and authorises each step. It never holds your money. |
| a workflow | The thing you save, run, schedule and chain. It holds a plan, and keeps every revision of it. |
| a strategy card | A rule in plain English that the agent writes in chat. It waits for a condition, a price or a clock, and acts inside limits you sign. |
| a plan | The steps inside a workflow. This is what you read before anything runs. |
The things you make
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Step | One thing the plan does, such as supply collateral or move money to another network. Steps have names, not positions, so inserting one does not renumber the rest. |
| Operation | One capability the platform has. A step uses an operation. The catalogue lists all of them. |
| Run | One execution of a workflow. A workflow can be run many times, and each run has its own record. |
| Version number | Every operation carries one, such as @v1.1. It pins the step to the behaviour you approved, so an update cannot change it halfway through. |
What happens during a run
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Wave | Steps that do not depend on each other run at the same time. What depends on what is worked out from the plan, not from the order you wrote. |
| Group | Steps merged into one transaction. All of it lands or none of it does, which is what makes “give permission, then supply” safe. |
| Stopped to ask | The run paused and is waiting for a decision from you. A normal outcome, not a failure. |
| Approval gate | A point where the run deliberately stops and asks a person. Some gates must be answered on the network itself. |
| Stuck | A transaction that will not go through. It is resent at a higher fee, up to a limit, and then waits for a person. |
| Amendment | An edit to a workflow that has already moved money. It can change the future and never the past: steps that already ran must stay exactly as they were. |
What starts a run without you
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Schedule | Starts a workflow on a clock. A saved schedule does nothing until you switch it on. |
| Price trigger | Starts a workflow when a price arrives. Also called a limit order. It rests as a price and a size and re-arms itself after each partial fill. |
| Chain (of workflows) | Workflows in order. One starts when the one before it succeeds. |
| Bite | One partial fill of a resting order. A 40% fill leaves 60% resting. Each bite is sized by an impact cap from one router quote, then rebuilt, re-priced and approved. |
| Firing | One occasion when a schedule or trigger went off. A firing that arrives while the same workflow is still running is recorded and asks you what you meant, rather than being dropped. For a card, a firing is its decision on one closed bar, written once with its reason. |
“Chain” means two things in these docs. A network is Ethereum, Base,
Arbitrum or HyperEVM. A chain of workflows is several workflows arranged to run in order.
Where it could be read either way, the pages say “a chain of workflows”.
What keeps it safe
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Your key | Yours. The root authority over the account. Nothing sits above it, including us. |
| The agent | A contract, not a key. Your account gives it permission, and a plain key cannot get that permission. It may call one approved operation on one account, and refuses anything else itself. Holds no money, pays no fees. |
| The agent’s signing key | Ours. It lives inside the hardware enclave. It is the only thing allowed to drive the agent contract, and driving it is all it can do. |
| The hardware enclave | A sealed computer that holds the agent’s signing key. It signs a step only if the step passes a fixed policy. See the enclave. |
| The fee-payer key | Ours. Pays network fees and sends transactions. Authorises nothing and holds nothing but fees. |
| The form | What the agent signs. It only supplies the amount, asset, network, operation and deadline. It cannot set a destination address or write a raw instruction. |
| Role | How a destination is written, such as your own account. It is looked up from your account and never chosen by the plan. |
| Daily limit | A cap per token over 24 hours, checked on the network. Only your wallet sets it, and the agent cannot raise it. It is off until you set it, and the app has no screen for it yet. |
| Standing down | Pointing your account at “no agent”. You do it from your own wallet, and the agent checks it on every call, so it stops at once. Your account can never be re-pointed at a different agent: the first agent you approve is fixed, and the only permitted change is to none. |
Strategy cards
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Strategy card | Your rule in a few lines of English: where it runs, when it acts, what it does and how much it may spend. You approve it with your signature. See strategy cards. |
| Measure | A small script that turns data into one number per closed bar, such as an RSI. A card reads it by name. A measure cannot move money. |
| Derived line | The checker’s paragraph on what a card can and can never do. Read it before you approve. |
| Variants tried | How many versions of the rule were backtested before this one. A high count means the best result may be luck. |
| Paper run | A card running with no money, to see what it would do. |
| Budget | The most a card may spend in total. A live card needs one. |
| Limits | The caps a card carries for each run. The only default is 1,000,000 USDC per run. |
| Parked | A firing the signer refused and set aside. The card keeps running. |
| Kill switch | The page where you stop one card or all your plans at once. See going live. |
| Run-once card | A card that does one thing when you start it, such as a bridge or a deposit, then ends. |
| Resting order card | A card that rests as a price and a size and acts the moment the price arrives. |
Venues
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Venue | An exchange outside your account: Binance (demo only), Hyperliquid or Lighter. Money at a venue is under its rules as well as ours. See trading venues. |
| Lock | A short record on a network, signed by your wallet. It says which markets a venue may trade for you and the highest leverage. |
| Grant | Your signed permission for exact markets, size limits, a number of runs and an expiry of at most 90 days. Switching one on is called arming in the app, and switching it off is called revoking. Revoking stops our relay and does not undo the signature. |
| Trading key | The key that signs orders at a venue. The enclave derives it from a sealed secret, so it is never stored. It cannot withdraw. |
| Market kind | A class of market a lock allows, such as crypto perpetuals or real-world-asset perpetuals. |
| Real-world-asset perpetual | A perpetual on a commodity, currency, equity or index. |
| Exit kit | A page that builds the calls you send from your own wallet to leave Lighter without us. |
| Close mode and cancel all | Two ways to stop a card at a venue. Close mode stops new entries and leaves protective orders. Cancel all also cancels open orders. |
| Protective order | A take-profit or stop-loss order that waits at a venue and closes part of a position. |
Security words
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Proved account | An account that fixes a list of what the agent may ever do, and checks a proof of every plan against it. See proved accounts. |
| Passkey approval | A passkey approves a run when you press Start. It does not sign you in and does not own the account. |
| Guardian | Our key that approves operations and can stop the agent. It cannot appoint an agent or touch your account. |
| Upgrader | Our key that can replace the code behind shared contracts. Today it works at once, with no delay. |
| Run evidence | A file a finished run can publish. It stays private to you unless you publish it. See agent identity. |
Networks and trades
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Crossing | A move of money between networks. It lands later in your account on the far side. |
| Impact cap | The most a bite may move the pool, fixed before the order is signed. |
| Price floor | The lowest output a swap accepts. An independent price check refuses a floor that is too low. |
| Sandwich | An attack where someone trades before and after your swap to profit from the price it moves. |
Agents and data
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| MCP | The standard way another AI agent connects to our tools. See connect your agent. |
| x402 | A way to pay for a request in USDC as part of the request. The gateway uses it. |
| Template agent | A ready-made agent you can hire. See hire an agent. |
| Hire grant | The signature that lets a hired agent run inside limits you set. |
| Agent card | A public file that tells other agents what DeFiLoops offers. See the agent card. |
| Credits | What the gateway charges for a request, at 100 credits per USDC. Credits are not refunded. |
| Feed runtime | The live data path that gives cards and triggers prices and other series. See the feed runtime. |
| Feed and view | A feed is a stream of raw values. A view is a series computed from feeds. |
| STALE | A tool answer older than ten minutes says so in the answer itself. |
What you set on a trade
Four different limits, routinely confused.| you set | it answers | who picks the size |
|---|---|---|
| Slippage | What will I still accept if the price moves before my transaction goes through? | Nobody. The size is yours. |
| Price impact | How far may my own trade move the pool? | The router, by shrinking what you offered. |
| Cost | How large a trade will the market take at this price? | The market, before you choose. |
| Limit price | What price will I accept? | The pool, which fills what clears and stops. |
Only the limit price is enforced on the network itself. A fill below it fails.
The two size limits can only make a trade smaller, so they do not need to be.
What the research answers are about
These appear in every answer the agent gives about a position, and none of them is obvious from the word.Providing liquidity
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Price range | The two prices your liquidity sits between. Also called a band. You choose it, and it decides almost everything else. |
| In range | The share of days the price stayed inside your range. Outside it you earn nothing at all, so a band that was in range 19% of the time earned for 19% of the time. |
| Fee tier | The cut the pool takes from each trade, such as 0.05% or 0.30%. The same pair usually has a pool at several tiers, and the best one depends on the pair and on your range. |
| Impermanent loss | How much less you earn by holding two assets in a pool than by just holding them. When they move apart, the pool sells you out of the one going up. It is called impermanent because it reverses if the price comes back, and permanent the moment you close. |
| APR, not APY | A rate that does not compound. Uniswap v3 keeps your fees in a separate balance, so nothing compounds unless you collect and re-add it yourself. |
Hedging with options
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Strike | The price the option pays out from. Written here as a multiple of today’s price: 0.8 means twenty percent below. |
| Premium | What the option costs. Paid every time you renew it, whether or not it ever pays out. |
| Structure | A named combination of options: a protective put, a collar, a put spread, a straddle. Nine of them can be priced. |
| Implied volatility | How much movement the option market is charging for. Higher means dearer protection. |
| DVOL | Deribit’s index of implied volatility, one number per day per asset, going back to 2021. |
| Skew | How much more volatility an out-of-the-money strike carries than an at-the-money one. It moves a hedging answer by more than the difference between hedging and not hedging, so every answer states the value it used. |
Perpetuals and forced closes
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Perpetual | A futures contract with no expiry. It is kept near the spot price by a payment between the two sides. |
| Funding rate | That payment. Positive means the long side pays the short side, so a sustained positive rate is the running cost of being long. It is quoted on the size of the position, not on the money you put up. |
| Open interest | How much is currently held, in total, on one side of a market. A reported zero is almost always missing data, because a live market always has some. |
| Liquidation | A position closed by force because its collateral no longer covers it. A cluster of them at a price is the risk a perpetual carries that an option does not. |
The slow signal
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Realised cap | Every coin valued at the price it last moved at, rather than at today’s price. In effect, what holders collectively paid. |
| MVRV | Today’s market value divided by that. Scored against its own history, it says whether the market is stretched. |
| Net liquidity | Central bank assets, less the Treasury’s account, less reverse repo. Roughly, how much money is being added to the system or drained from it. |
Reading any of it
| word | what it means |
|---|---|
| Backtest | Running a strategy over history that already happened, to see what it would have done. It is not a forecast, and a backtest is only worth reading if its inputs held still while you read it. |
| Recorded history | Market data collected on a schedule and stored, so asking the same question twice gives the same answer. Three tools read the newest data instead (the latest perpetual sample, forced closes as recorded, the live option book), and each says so. |
Two conventions that trip people up
Amounts are written twice. Machines write amounts as very large integers, so a plan says1000000 where you mean 1.00. Every plan therefore also states
each amount in plain units with the symbol. Read that one.
Prices are two whole numbers, never a decimal. A limit price is written as
out units/in units, for example 1250000/1000000000. A price written as a
decimal has to be converted against two different token scales, and every place
that happens is a place a limit can be multiplied by a million by mistake.