Smart Contract

A financial ecosystem built on blockchain technology that provides financial services — including lending, borrowing, trading, insurance, and asset management — without traditional intermediaries such as banks, brokerages, or exchanges. DeFi protocols use smart contracts to automate financial transactions and are typically open-source, permissionless, and composable.

The ecosystem of business models, partnerships, and revenue streams enabled by application programming interfaces that allow software systems to communicate and share data. APIs enable companies to monetise their data and functionality, create platform ecosystems, and embed services into third-party applications.

Digital intangible assets recorded and verified on a distributed ledger, including cryptocurrencies, tokenised securities, non-fungible tokens, and smart contracts. The valuation and accounting treatment of blockchain assets remain an evolving area, with significant implications for enterprise balance sheets.

A machine learning technique that trains models across multiple decentralised devices or servers holding local data, without transferring the raw data to a central location. Federated learning addresses data privacy and sovereignty concerns by keeping sensitive data on-device while still enabling collaborative model improvement.

A centralised platform for storing, managing, and serving the engineered features (input variables) used by machine learning models in both training and real-time inference. Feature stores ensure consistency between training and production environments, enable feature reuse across multiple ML models, reduce duplication of feature engineering effort, and provide a governance layer for tracking feature lineage and ownership.

A reduction applied to the value of a minority ownership interest to reflect the holder's inability to influence key business decisions such as dividend policy, asset sales, or management appointments. DLOC is the inverse of the control premium and is typically derived from observed control premium data in comparable transactions.

A branch of artificial intelligence concerned with enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. NLP powers applications such as chatbots, sentiment analysis, document classification, and automated contract review.

An element of M&A purchase price that is payable only if specified future conditions are met, such as revenue targets or product milestones. Contingent consideration must be measured at fair value at the acquisition date and is particularly common in deals where intangible asset values are uncertain.