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Four guides to read before you put money into crypto
How to Buy Crypto Safely for the First Time
A first-time buyer guide: choosing a regulated exchange, spread and fees, KYC, a step-by-step first purchase, common mistakes and when to use a wallet.
How to Store Crypto Safely
Compare exchange custody, hot wallets and hardware wallets, and learn how to back up a seed phrase, secure accounts, and plan for inheritance.
Crypto Taxes in the US: The Basics
How US crypto taxes work: taxable events, capital gains, cost basis, Form 8949, Form 1099-DA, wallet-by-wallet basis and wash sales, sourced to the IRS.
Crypto Scams and Red Flags to Spot
Learn how pig butchering, fake support, wallet drainers, rug pulls and address poisoning work, how to revoke approvals, and what to do if scammed.
Glossary
Terms, in plain English
- Account abstraction
- A set of changes that lets a crypto wallet follow programmable rules instead of being controlled by one private key and nothing else. Features like fee sponsorship, batching, passkeys and recovery become possible.
- Address poisoning
- A scam that exploits habit: an attacker sends you a tiny or zero-value transaction from an address that looks like one you use, matching the first and last characters.
- Burnalso: token burn
- Using payments to remove tokens, which ties a network's usage to its token supply. When usage is high, more tokens are burned than issued and supply shrinks; when usage is low, issuance outweighs the burn and supply grows.
- Form 1099-DA
- "Digital Asset Proceeds from Broker Transactions", the form US brokers now file to report crypto sales; the crypto equivalent of Form 1099-B for stocks. It is not a substitute for your own records.
- Hardware wallet
- A dedicated device that keeps your keys and is not connected to the internet except when you sign a transaction.
- Token approvalalso: approval
- Permission that lets a smart contract spend a token from your wallet. It can spend at any time until the approval is revoked, and unlimited approvals extend this to the full balance of that token.
The rest of the library
Everything else, by topic
Staking and scaling
Coins and identity
| Name | Price (USD) | 24h | Market cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| BitcoinBTC | $74,599.00 | −1.57% down | $1.50T |
| EthereumETH | $2,121.58 | −4.88% down | $259.3B |
| TetherUSDT | $0.9992 | +0.02% up | $176.9B |
| BNBBNB | $686.58 | −1.43% down | $90.3B |
| USDCUSDC | $0.9995 | 0.00% unchanged | $70.1B |
Total market cap $2.51T · Bitcoin dominance 59.6% · As of · Source: CoinGecko