Perpetuals, pools and staking — the mechanics and the arithmetic, written before the desk's own crypto area opens so nobody learns them from a sales page.
- What a perpetual future is and how funding works
A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry, held near the spot price by a payment that changes hands every hour or every eight. The mechanism, the arithmetic of what it costs to hold one, where liquidation actually happens, and where a U.S. trader can and cannot do it.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Spot vs perps vs on-chain: where a trade actually happens
The same "buy bitcoin" can be a coin in your own wallet, a claim on an exchange's balance sheet, a leveraged contract that never delivers a coin, or a swap against a formula with no counterparty at all. What each one is, who holds what while the trade is open, what happens when the venue fails, and the question to ask before pressing the button — whose asset is it at 3 a.m.?
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Holding your own keys: what a signature proves, and what nobody should ask you for
A crypto wallet is a key, not a vault, and the recovery phrase is the key to the key. Why there is no password reset, what "sign a message" proves against what "sign a transaction" does, how 2024's $494 million of drainer thefts were taken, why the desk wallet's key lives at wallet.tradersoth.com and what its password is not, and the short list of things TOTH will never ask you for.
15 MIN · REVIEWED NOV 2026
- The vault: hash-based keys and what they protect
The TOTH Vault parks funds in a program account that only a hash-based signature can spend from — a one-time key under a Merkle tree, so one address serves 256 spends and a used leaf is refused. What a hash-based signature is and why it signs once, what the vault address is and is not, what the program does and does not do, what a spend costs, and what to do when a signed spend is waiting.
10 MIN · REVIEWED NOV 2026
- Liquidity pools and impermanent loss, with the arithmetic
A pool is a formula, not a market maker. What x · y = k does to your deposit when the price moves, the loss table every liquidity provider should know by heart, and what the Uniswap v3 data said about who actually came out ahead.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Staking — what you earn, what you risk, what is taxed
Staking pays you in the token for helping run its network. The yield is newly issued coins plus fees, it is quoted in a currency whose price is the real risk, part of it can be destroyed by a mistake, and in the United States it is income the day you can spend it. The mechanics on Ethereum and Solana, with the figures as of October 2026.
6 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Post-quantum on a token vs in a wallet: what the words can and cannot mean
A quantum computer large enough to run Shor's algorithm breaks the signatures Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana all use, and no token on those chains is "quantum-safe" by itself. What the threat is, what NIST standardised and when the old algorithms are disallowed, what each chain is doing, what a hash-based vault and a signed attestation each protect, and the honest claim a token can make.
6 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
Education, not advice. Nothing on this page recommends buying or selling anything, and nothing is a promise of results — every figure is hypothetical. TOTH does not provide investment advice. New to the vocabulary? The glossary has plain definitions.