It doesn’t make much sense to lend money for free. If Alice wants to borrow $10,000 from Bob, Bob will need a financial incentive to loan it to her. That incentive comes in the form of interest – a kind of fee that gets added on top of the amount Alice borrows.

When you’re prompted to update your digital banking app on your smartphone, you probably don’t even think twice. Maybe your phone auto-updates without you even noticing. It’s a necessary process, after all – if you don’t install the latest version of the software, you run the risk of being denied access to its services.

Liquidity is the measure of how easily you can convert an asset into cash or another asset. You may have the rarest, most valuable old book in your backpack, but if you're alone on a remote island, it will be difficult to find a buyer. On the other hand, if you'd like to buy $100 USD of BTC on the BTC/USDT pair on Binance, you'll be able to do it almost instantly without any impact on price. This is why liquidity is important when it comes to financial assets.

In short, financial risk is the risk of losing money or valuable assets. In the context of financial markets, we may define risk as the amount of money one can lose when trading or investing. So, the risk is not the actual loss, but what can be eventually lost.

Market capitalization applies as much to stock markets as it does to cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects. It tells us the current market value of a given cryptocurrency or blockchain network.

Since the inception of Bitcoin in 2008, as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, many other cryptocurrencies were created, each one with a particular mechanism. But one thing that nearly all cryptocurrencies have in common is the blockchain, as the core element of their architecture.

Black Monday is the name used to describe a sudden and severe stock market crash that occurred on October 19th, 1987. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), an index that measures the US stock market performance, fell more than 22%. The crash was preceded by two other large drops a week before.