Glossary

Key terms used throughout the NMT platform and this documentation.

DeFi Terms

AMM (Automated Market Maker) A smart contract that creates liquidity pools where users can swap tokens. Instead of matching buyers and sellers, trades happen against a pool of tokens with prices set by a mathematical formula.

APY (Annual Percentage Yield) The annualized return on an investment, including compound interest. An APY of 10% means $1,000 would grow to ~$1,100 over one year.

Concentrated Liquidity A feature of Uniswap V3/V4 where liquidity providers choose a specific price range for their capital. More capital-efficient than full-range liquidity but requires active management.

DEX (Decentralized Exchange) A platform for swapping tokens directly on the blockchain without an intermediary. Uniswap and Aerodrome are DEXs.

ERC-4626 A standard interface for yield-bearing vaults. Morpho and Yearn vaults follow this standard, which defines deposit(), withdraw(), and other common functions.

Liquidity Pool A smart contract holding two or more tokens. Users trade against the pool rather than other users. Liquidity providers deposit tokens into the pool and earn fees from trades.

MEV (Miner/Maximal Extractable Value) Profit extracted from users by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions. "Sandwich attacks" are a common form — a bot front-runs and back-runs your swap to profit from the price impact. Cow Protocol protects against this.

TVL (Total Value Locked) The total USD value of assets deposited in a DeFi protocol or pool. Higher TVL generally means more liquidity and less slippage.

Tick (Uniswap V3) A discrete price point in Uniswap V3. Concentrated liquidity positions are defined by a lower tick and upper tick — the price range where the position is active.

Yield Farming The practice of depositing tokens into DeFi protocols to earn returns. Returns come from trading fees (DEXs), interest (lending), or token rewards.

Smart Wallet Terms

Gnosis Safe (Safe) A multi-signature smart wallet. Requires one or more signatures to execute transactions. NMT uses Safe as the base for its permissioned execution environment.

Delegate An address that has been granted permission to execute specific actions on a user's Safe. Delegates cannot move funds out of the Safe — they can only call approved module functions.

Module A smart contract that extends Safe's functionality. NMT's protocol modules (AaveModule, UniswapV3Module, etc.) are Safe modules that enable specific DeFi interactions.

Bundler (DelegateBundler) A contract that executes multiple operations in a single atomic transaction. If any step fails, everything reverts.

EIP-712 An Ethereum standard for typed structured data signing. It makes signatures human-readable in wallets, so users can see exactly what they're authorizing.

Technical Terms

Axum The Rust web framework used by the NMT backend. Built on Tokio and Tower.

Crate A Rust package. The NMT backend workspace contains multiple crates (api, workers, storage, etc.).

Entity (SeaORM) A Rust struct that maps to a database table. Each entity defines the columns, types, and relationships for one table.

Indexing The process of reading blockchain events and storing structured data in the database. The backend "indexes" on-chain activity to make it queryable.

Prisma A TypeScript ORM used by the frontend to query the PostgreSQL database from Next.js server components.

RPC (Remote Procedure Call) The protocol for communicating with blockchain nodes. HTTPS for reads, WebSocket for real-time subscriptions.

SeaORM The Rust ORM used by the backend for database operations. Async-native with compile-time query validation.

Server Component (React/Next.js) A React component that runs on the server and can directly access databases and APIs without exposing code to the browser.

SWR (Stale-While-Revalidate) A data fetching strategy where cached data is shown immediately, then updated in the background. Used by the frontend for API calls.

Tokio The async runtime for Rust. Handles concurrent I/O operations (blockchain reads, API calls, database queries) efficiently.

Viem A lightweight TypeScript library for Ethereum interactions. Used by the frontend for reading blockchain state and encoding transactions.

Infrastructure Terms

DOKS (Digital Ocean Kubernetes Service) Digital Ocean's managed Kubernetes service. NMT's backend runs on DOKS.

Helm A package manager for Kubernetes. NMT uses Helm charts to define and deploy the backend infrastructure.

Helm Chart A collection of Kubernetes manifest templates. The NMT chart is in backend/.helm/.

Ingress A Kubernetes resource that manages external access to services. NMT uses NGINX ingress to route traffic to the backend.

cert-manager A Kubernetes add-on that automatically provisions TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt.

Trivy A container security scanner that checks Docker images for known vulnerabilities (CVEs).