Glossary
The vocabulary, in plain English.
Written for a compliance reader who is new to how these markets settle. Where a term has a precise meaning in our product, the definition here matches that meaning rather than the general one.
- Account cluster
- A group of accounts that behave as one participant, identified from funding relationships, timing, and who repeatedly trades with whom. Grouping accounts changes what other measurements mean: activity spread across nine accounts can be concentration once those nine are read as one.See also sybil, funding graph, position concentration
- Anonymised reference
- The stable label that stands in for an account or a cluster throughout a report, in place of its address. It lets a reader follow one participant across many findings without being handed an identity. References are one-way: the label cannot be turned back into the address.
- Assurance
- Independent integrity reporting across a set of platforms rather than one. It requires an observer with no stake in any single platform's results, which is the one thing no operator and no in-house function can be.See also benchmarking, supervision
- Attestation
- An operator's formal statement that named accounts are theirs and act under a specific mandate, most often market making. Attestation is what turns an ambiguous observation into a classified one, and it is the input only the operator can supply.See also reconciliation, market making, wash trading
- Benchmarking
- Comparing one platform's integrity measurements against a baseline drawn from several. It answers a question no operator can answer from inside their own book: is this normal for the sector, or unusual?See also cross-platform divergence, reconciliation
- Caveat
- A stated limit on what a finding can support. Caveats travel with the finding rather than sitting in an appendix, because a detection read without its limit is routinely read as more than it is.See also observation depth, screening evidence
- Coordinated positioning
- Several accounts taking the same side of the same market within a very short window. The pattern is identical whether the accounts acted together or all reacted to the same public moment, so the finding is the tight window, not the coordination.See also account cluster
- Counterparty
- The account on the other side of a trade. Repeated pairings between the same two accounts, especially in both directions, are one of the signals that they belong to one participant.See also account cluster, wash trading
- Cross-platform divergence
- The same question priced differently on two platforms. A brief gap is ordinary. A persistent, one-directional gap suggests information is reaching one platform first, and it can only be measured by an observer watching both.See also benchmarking
- Detector
- The rule that implements one indicator. Detectors are hand-written rather than learned, so each one can be read, argued with, and defended. A rule that cannot be explained in a meeting is not usable evidence.See also indicator, false positive
- Exposure
- The money a participant has put at risk on one side of a market. We measure net buy exposure observed during a review period, which is a deliberately conservative stand-in for open interest.See also open interest, position concentration
- False positive
- A detection with an innocent explanation. These are expected and are not failures: a system tuned to produce none would be missing real patterns. What matters is that each one is recorded, labelled, and used to sharpen the rule that produced it.See also detector, typology
- Fill
- A completed trade, as opposed to an order. Where a platform's matching runs on infrastructure whose order book is not public, fills are the only thing that reaches the settlement record, which is what limits order-book indicators.See also order book, screening evidence
- Funding graph
- The map of transfers into and between trading accounts. It is the main evidence for linking accounts, and also what makes layering visible. Shared infrastructure is excluded from it, because a hub that everyone touches would otherwise link everyone.See also account cluster, layering, liquidity hub
- Indicator
- One narrow question about market behaviour, mapped to the licence obligation it speaks to. There are twelve, across anti-money- laundering, market integrity, and consumer protection.See also detector, obligation mapping
- Layering
- Moving funds through intermediate steps to obscure where they came from. One of the classic stages of laundering. Ordinary transfers between an exchange, a wallet and a platform produce a similar shape, so the timing relative to a position is what makes it notable.See also funding graph, structuring
- Licence condition
- A duty attached to an operator's permission to run a platform. The conditions relevant here fall into three families: anti-money- laundering, market integrity, and consumer protection. Every finding is mapped to the condition it engages.See also obligation mapping, indicator
- Liquidity hub
- An account or contract that a very large number of others transact with, such as a pooling or custody service. Hubs are excluded from account linking: including one connects every participant who ever touched it, which manufactures findings rather than discovering them.See also funding graph, account cluster, false positive
- Markers of harm
- Patterns in a trading rhythm that, in a person, can indicate gambling harm: escalating stakes after losses, trading without rest. They are equally the signature of trading software. The finding requests a behavioural review and never asserts harm.See also caveat
- Market making
- Quoting both sides of a market continuously so that others can trade. Authorised market making is a service an operator arranges, and its trading record looks almost exactly like wash trading. Separating them is what attestation is for.See also attestation, wash trading, reconciliation
- Obligation mapping
- Tying each finding to the specific duty it speaks to. A detection with no duty attached is trivia. We describe what was detected and which obligation it engages, and stop there: whether a breach occurred is a judgement for the operator's compliance and legal function.See also licence condition, indicator
- Observation depth
- How long we have been watching a platform. It bounds several findings directly: a new account means new to our observation, and an account may be much older than our record of it. Where depth is short, the affected indicators under-report, and we say so rather than estimating.See also caveat
- Open interest
- The total value of positions currently held in a market. Computing it exactly needs position-level data, which observation from outside does not provide, so exposure is used as a conservative proxy.See also exposure
- Order book
- The live record of orders waiting to trade. Where matching runs on infrastructure that does not publish one, orders placed and cancelled without trading leave no public trace, which is why spoofing detection is screening only on such platforms.See also fill, spoofing, screening evidence
- Position concentration
- One participant holding most of the money at stake on one side of a market. Measured across a cluster rather than per account. It is a fairness concern before it is any allegation: everyone else is trading against a counterparty they cannot see.See also exposure, account cluster
- Public settlement data
- The record a platform writes to a public ledger when trades settle: which accounts traded, in which market, at what price and moment. It is what makes independent observation possible without integration or permission, and it is also less than the operator holds, not more.See also fill, observation depth
- Reconciliation
- Setting independent observation against an operator's own declarations. Neither is trustworthy alone: a declaration is unverified and raw detection is ambiguous. The checked relationship between them is the finding, and neither party can produce it unaided.See also attestation, supervision, assurance
- Resolution window
- The period immediately before a market settles. It attracts extra scrutiny because it is when acting on a known outcome is most profitable, and therefore when the cost of not looking is highest.See also indicator
- Screening evidence
- A finding strong enough to say something is worth examining, but not strong enough to attribute to an account or support a conclusion. Labelling it as such is the point: an operator told their platform is clean by a system that could not have seen the problem has been given false assurance.See also caveat, spoofing
- Severity
- How much attention a finding asks for, from low to critical, set by the size of what was observed and the weight of the obligation it engages. Severity ranks the queue. It is not a measure of how certain the finding is.See also obligation mapping
- Spoofing
- Placing orders with no intention of trading them, to move the price for a position held elsewhere. Detecting it needs the order book. Where the book is not public, we say the indicator cannot see, rather than reporting an absence of findings as a clean result.See also order book, screening evidence
- Structuring
- Assembling a large position out of many small trades rather than a few obvious ones. Checked in regulated finance because it can keep activity under reporting thresholds. Working a large order into a thin market looks the same, and is the more common explanation.See also layering, account cluster
- Supervision
- Checking whether an operator's own monitoring caught what an independent observer detected. It answers a different question from detection: not is there a problem, but is the control working.See also reconciliation, assurance
- Sybil
- One participant presenting as many, by holding many accounts. The reason account linking comes before almost every other measurement: until accounts are grouped, one participant's activity is systematically understated.See also account cluster
- Typology
- A documented pattern, recorded with the quantitative signature that identifies it. Negative typologies, patterns that turned out to be infrastructure rather than wrongdoing, are recorded with the same care as positive ones, and are the more useful half.See also false positive, detector
- Wash trading
- Trading with yourself, so that volume appears without any position changing hands. It makes a market look deeper than it is. It is also an accurate description of authorised market making, which is why the first question is always whether the accounts are declared.See also market making, attestation, counterparty