Web3 Data Glossary

A curated collection of keywords in web3 data & analytics.

Web3 Data Glossary

A curated collection of keywords in web3 data & analytics.

Browse Alphabetically

A

ABI

Application Binary Interface is represented in JSON format and specifies how to encode and decode data from a particular smart contract.

Active users

The number of people actively using your app or platform in a given time period, measured daily, weekly, or monthly (DAU, WAU, MAU).

Address

A unique set of alphanumeric characters that can send and receive cryptocurrency and NFTs on a blockchain.


Airdrops

Airdrops are used to distribute new or existing tokens to many wallet addresses, often as part of a promotional campaign or as a reward to early adopters.

Average Session Time

How long a user spends on your site or dapp.

AMM (Automated Market Maker)

A DEX protocol that prices tokens algorithmically using liquidity pools and smart contracts, replacing the traditional order book. Examples: Uniswap, Curve, Balancer.

B

Behavioral Analytics

The study of user actions within a product to understand engagement and improve experiences.

Block

A batch of transactions is written to the blockchain. Every block contains information about the previous block, thus chaining them together.

Blockchain

A publicly accessible digital ledger is used to store and transfer information without the need for a central authority. Blockchains are the core technology on which cryptocurrency protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum are built.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the relative number of visitors who have left the site after a single page view, compared to the total number of unique visitors.

Bridge

A bridge allows assets such as tokens or NFTs from different blockchain networks to be transferred or “bridged” between each other.

Blockchain Nodes

A server or computer running blockchain-specific software used for connecting to and interacting with that blockchain.

C

Chain ID

A number that identifies a specific blockchain network. For example, Ethereum is Chain 1, Polygon is Chain 137, and Base is Chain 8453.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

How much you’ve spent to acquire a customer.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV estimates the total revenue a user generates over their entire engagement with your dapp.

Cohort Analysis

Grouping wallets by a shared starting event, such as first deposit date, and tracking how each group retains over time to measure protocol engagement trends.

Customer Health Scores

A composite score reflecting a wallet's engagement level and likelihood of continued participation, used to flag loyal users and those at risk of churning.

Customer Personas

Structured profiles of distinct user segments built from wallet behavior, token holdings, and transaction history rather than traditional demographic data.

D

DAO

Decentralized Autonomous Organization: A self-governing, blockchain-based community that uses self-executing code, token voting, or some other programmatic mechanism for coordination.

DApp

Decentralized Application: An application built on open-source code that lives on the blockchain. Dapps exist independent of centralized groups or figures and often incentivize users to maintain them through rewarded tokens.

Dapp Analytics

Data and metrics that show how people are using a decentralized app, including how many wallets connect, what actions they take, and whether they come back.

Daily Active Users (DAU)

The number of unique people who use your app on a given day.

Data Collection

Gathering information about how users interact with your product, such as wallet activity, form responses, and onchain behavior, to inform decisions and improve experiences.

DeFi

Decentralized Finance: A category of blockchain-based financial applications and infrastructure that is designed to replace financial intermediaries with software.

Decentralization

A system that operates without the control of a central figure or authority, and replaces it with a distributed peer-to-peer network.

DEX

Decentralized exchange: A platform where various cryptocurrencies can be swapped, traded, and added to liquidity pools. A DEX is run by smart contracts and not controlled by a single business entity, group, or individual.

e

ENS

Ethereum Name Service: A system that lets you replace a long wallet address with a human-readable name, like "alice.eth", similar to how domain names work for websites.

ERC

Ethereum Request for Comments: An application-level standard for Ethereum (i.e. ERC-20 is a common protocol for deploying fungible tokens on Ethereum).

ERC20

The Ethereum token standard, providing a standardized smart contract structure for fungible tokens.

ERC721

An Ethereum token standard that allows for the formation of unique tokens, otherwise known as NFTs. Unlike ERC-20, ERC-721 tokens have specific properties that allow each to be uniquely identified and valued independently of one another.

EVM

Ethereum Virtual Machine: The engine that runs smart contracts on Ethereum. It processes the code behind every transaction and application built on the network.

f

Farcaster

A protocol for developing decentralized social network applications built on Optimism, which is a layer-two scaling solution for Ethereum.

Faucets

Sources of token supply and a tool for keeping prices balanced in a virtual economy. Airdrops and DAO Treasury distributions are two common types of faucets.

Funnel Analytics

Measuring how wallets move through a defined sequence of dapp steps, such as wallet connect to first swap, to identify drop-off points and optimize conversion.

G

Growth Analytics

Tracking whether a DeFi protocol is acquiring and retaining wallets over time, using metrics like activation rate, cohort retention, and revenue per active wallet.

I

Incentive Campaigns

Time-limited token reward or fee rebate programs that incentivize specific onchain actions, such as providing liquidity or referring new wallets to a protocol.

Incentivized Liquidity

Liquidity deposited primarily due to token reward programs rather than organic fee revenue, considered less stable as it often exits when emissions decrease.

L

Liquidity

A measure for how easily an asset can be converted to another (usually cash but also common for Layer 1 tokens)

Liquidity Pool

A liquidity pool is a pool of cryptocurrencies available to trade on a decentralized exchange (DEX). Pools are usually composed of assets deposited by users, which can be traded with other assets in the pool through smart contracts.

Lifecycle

The stages a wallet passes through with a DeFi protocol, from acquisition and activation through engagement, retention, and eventual dormancy or reactivation.

M

Mainnet

The production version of a blockchain network where transactions and other operations are recorded and processed. It is a blockchain protocol’s primary and original network, as opposed to a testnet.

MAU / WAU / DAU

Monthly / Weekly / Daily Active Users. Standard metrics adapted for Web3, measuring how many unique wallets interact with a product over specific timeframes.

Marketing Attribution Analytics

Determining which campaigns drove wallet activations by combining UTM tracking with wallet-level event data to connect offchain marketing to onchain outcomes.

O

Off-chain

Anything that happens outside of the blockchain. Off-chain activity is faster and cheaper but relies on a trusted party rather than being automatically verified by the network.

On-chain

Anything that happens directly on the blockchain. On-chain activity is publicly recorded, permanent, and enforced automatically without needing a middleman.

Oracles

A service supplying smart contracts with data from the outside world. Smart contracts are unable to access data that exists off-chain, so they rely on oracles to retrieve, verify, and provide external information. (i.e. Chainlink, Band Protocol)

Onchain Attribution

Tracing a wallet's first protocol interaction back to a specific marketing source using the wallet address as a persistent identifier instead of browser cookies.

Onchain Conversion Rate

The percentage of wallets that complete a target onchain action, such as a first swap or deposit, out of all wallets that entered a defined acquisition funnel.

P

Protocol Revenue

Fees captured by the protocol itself, separate from LP distributions, used to measure product-market fit and sustainability without reliance on token emissions.

Product Analytics

Using onchain transaction data and front-end event tracking together to understand how wallets interact with a dapp's features, flows, and interfaces.

Product Metrics

KPIs for a DeFi protocol including daily active wallets, time to first transaction, activation rate, cohort retention, and revenue per active wallet over time.

Profiles

Unified records aggregating onchain and offchain wallet data, including transaction history, token balances, lifecycle stage, and health score, used for segmentation.

R

Referrals

How many users are referred to your site or dapp by a particular user. We use the referral and ref query parameters to track referrals.

Referrers / Sources

How many users are referred to your site or dapp by a particular source such as a search engines, social media platform, etc.

Referrers are the statistics for the referring site. The data is extracted from the Referers (with a r) HTTP header and may not be set by the browser. In these cases it will be listed as unknown.

RPC

Remote Procedure Call, which is a protocol that allows programs to execute procedures or functions on a remote server as if they were local.

S

Smart Contract

A piece of code that lives on a blockchain and automatically executes an action when certain conditions are met, with no need for a middleman or manual approval.

Smart Contract Events

Events are user-defined custom events. They have a name and optional metadata key/value pairs. When you expand the activity feed, you can view and filter the metadata.

Metadata can be anything. For example, you can define an event Button clicked and track which button was clicked as the metadata field button=Header.

Solidity

The native programming language of Ethereum, mainly used to write smart contracts.

Stablecoins

Tokens designed to maintain a stable price. These can be pegged to currencies, like the U.S. dollar, or regulated algorithmically by automated market-making processes.

Staking

The process by which validators lock tokens in code-enforced escrow accounts to help secure a proof of stake blockchain network. Staking is a kind of “security” sink-in that takes tokens out of circulation.

Social Data

Data from decentralized social platforms such as Farcaster and Lens, linked to a wallet address and used to enrich profiles and qualify airdrop recipients.

Startup Analytics

Analytics for early-stage DeFi protocols focused on leading indicators like wallet activation rate and cohort retention rather than lagging metrics like TVL.

Sybil Wallet

A wallet created to simulate a unique user and claim a disproportionate share of an airdrop or incentive program, typically operating in clusters with shared funding sources.

Segmentation

Dividing a wallet base into groups by shared onchain characteristics, such as token holdings or lifecycle stage, to enable targeted campaigns and behavioral analysis.

T

Tokenomics

Short for “token economics," a field concerning the design of incentive systems for virtual economies, as in blockchain networks. Healthy systems should balance sources of market supply and demand — such as faucets and sinks, to maintain equilibrium.

Transaction

A transaction is a digitally signed message authorizing some particular action associated with the blockchain. In a currency, the dominant transaction type is sending currency units or tokens to someone else.

TVL (Total Value Locked)

The total value of assets deposited in a protocol's smart contracts, the most cited measure of scale, best interpreted alongside revenue and active wallet data.

U

Unique Active Wallets

How many unique wallets are actively interacting with your site or dapp.

User ID

A unique identifier assigned to each user in a system.

Utility

The usefulness of something. Often used to describe the functionality of a token, app, or protocol.

UTM parameters

Tags added to the end of a URL to track where your visitors are coming from, such as a specific ad, social post, or email campaign. We track these UTM codes:

  • utm_source (e.g.: google.com)

  • utm_medium (e.g.: search)

  • utm_campaign (e.g.: summer_sale)

  • utm_content

  • utm_term

User Analytics

Tracking how individual wallets interact with a DeFi protocol over time, using the wallet address as the primary identifier across sessions and front-end interfaces.

V

Validator

Computers that maintain the security of a blockchain network by verifying the validity of proposed transactions. Validators reach an agreement on state transitions according to the rules prescribed by their consensus mechanisms.

W

Wallets

Software based on cryptographic key pairs that enable blockchain network interactions, such as holding and controlling tokens. In blockchain networks, wallets play a role akin to the role web browsers play for web users.

Wallet Address

Also known as a public key, this is an alphanumeric code that serves as the address for a blockchain wallet, similar to a bank account number. Other users can send digital assets to your wallet via your public key, but only you can access your wallet’s contents by using the corresponding private key.

Formo uses the wallet address as a persistent identifier for a visitor where available.

Wallet Analytics

A view of everything a wallet has done onchain, including transactions, token holdings, and which apps it has interacted with.

Wallet Connects

How many users have connected their crypto wallets to your dapp.

Wallet Labels

Labels are assigned to a wallet address based on its past onchain activity and public information offchain.

Wallet Profiles

Wallet profiles are a collection of onchain and offchain data about a wallet.

Wallet Type

How many users are using a particular wallet type such as MetaMask, Rainbow Wallet, etc.

Wallet Reputation Score

A score that indicates the quality and intent of a wallet address.

Web Analytics

The collection and analysis of website traffic and user behavior data.

Web2

Another name for the second phase of the commercial internet, circa 2006–2020. Also known as the read-write era.

Web3

The current era of the internet, built on blockchain technology. Unlike Web2 where platforms own your data, Web3 gives users ownership and control over their assets and identity.

Web3 Analytics

Tracking onchain and offchain data to understand wallet behavior and protocol performance, using the wallet address as the persistent identifier instead of browser cookies.

Whale

An individual or organization that holds a large amount of cryptocurrency. Whales often significantly influence the market due to their ability to buy or sell large amounts of cryptocurrency at once, potentially causing large price movements.

Wallet Activation

The moment a wallet completes its first meaningful protocol action, such as a first swap or deposit, marking its transition from passive visitor to active participant.

Z

Zero-knowledge Proofs

A method in cryptography where one party can prove a statement's truth without revealing any additional information.