The Reference
The Confidently Crypto Glossary.
Every term of art from the show — from Momo to market structure — defined in plain English. New terms are added after each episode, and terms Dr. Evans uses on this week's episode are highlighted on the home page.
This Week's Terms From "The Hidden Costs of AI and Anne Griffin's Human-First Approach to Getting It Right in Business" · October 13, 2026
- ACH New
- Automated Clearing House — the banking system behind your direct deposits and bill payments, which moved roughly $93 trillion in a year. The honest benchmark stablecoin volume still lags far behind.
- AI Agent New
- An AI agent is a type of artificial intelligence that does more than answer questions. It can take actions on your behalf, such as searching, comparing options, logging into systems, and completing tasks, including making payments. Agentic AI is the term for this category, and it is what separates AI that talks from AI that acts.
- Agentic AI New
- The newest and the one that changes the legal conversation: an AI agent doesn't just answer you, it acts on your behalf — planning steps, using other tools, logging into systems, and completing tasks, including paying for things. Type five of five.
- Agentic Payments New
- Agentic payments are payments initiated and completed by an AI agent rather than by a person clicking "approve." They are often small, frequent payments for things like data, software access, or computing power, and they increasingly run on stablecoins because those settle quickly at any hour.
- AML / KYC / KYA New
- Anti-money laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) checks verify who is actually moving money. Know Your Agent (KYA) is the emerging third check — verifying the AI agent doing the moving. Per BlackRock's paper, all of these generally happen off-chain today, which is exactly the gap next week's episode takes on.
- CLARITY Act New
- The market-structure bill that would decide whether a digital asset is a security or a commodity — and which regulator oversees it. Its cloture vote failed 49 to 50 on September 15, needing 60, which handed the pen back to the agencies.
- Issue-Spotting New
- Seeing the legal or business question before it becomes the problem. The three AI questions in this episode — where AI runs, whether it advises or acts, and who owns it when it's wrong — are issue-spotting questions, not legal answers.
- Machine-Native Money New
- BlackRock's term for digital assets: value translated into standardized digital tokens that machines can transfer and settle natively — the money side of a pairing with AI, which they call machine-native intelligence.
- Out-of-Band Verification New
- Out-of-band verification means confirming a request through a different channel than the one it arrived on, using contact information you already had. If a payment request comes by text or phone call, you hang up and call back the number you know, not the number in the message.
- Regulation Crypto Assets New
- The SEC's proposed framework for crypto offerings, still open for comment — one of the agency actions now shaping crypto's future while Congress stays deadlocked.
- Stablecoin New
- Private digital money designed to hold its dollar value. Adjusted stablecoin transaction volume topped $11 trillion in 2025 — the same broad range as Visa and MasterCard's annual volumes, though still far below the roughly $93 trillion that moved over ACH.
- Token (AI) vs. Token (Crypto) New
- Same word, two jobs. In AI, a token is a small piece of text — a word or word fragment — that a model converts into numbers it can compute. In crypto, a token is a digital claim (a dollar, a fund share) translated into a standardized unit machines can move and settle. Different jobs, same move: translating the real world into something machines can use natively.
Mobile Money & Africa's Digital Economy The rails, the verdict, and the statutes behind Africa's money movement
- Mobile Money (MoMo)
- Phone-based money transfer and payments run by telecom companies on their own closed-loop ledgers — the dominant way millions in Ghana and across Africa already pay for things every day.
- E-Money
- Electronic money — value stored digitally and backed one-to-one by real bank holdings. Mobile money wallets and stablecoins are both forms of it; the difference is whose ledger the balance lives on.
- Cross-Border Corridor
- A payment route between two countries — like the U.S.–Ghana corridor — where money must move across different banking systems, currencies, and regulators to reach its destination.
- Correspondent Banking Friction
- The slow, expensive chain of intermediary banks that historically stood between a payer in one country and a supplier in another — the problem new payment rails are built to remove.
- AfCFTA
- The African Continental Free Trade Area — a single market of roughly 1.3 billion people, and the reason cross-border payment rails on the continent matter as much as they do.
- Regulatory Sandbox
- A supervised testing environment for licensed virtual asset businesses — Ghana's is already seating its first companies.
- WeWire
- Cross-border payments company co-founded by Eben Ghanney (Sep 8 episode), building the rails that let businesses move money between Africa and the rest of the world without the old correspondent-banking friction.
US Crypto Law & Market Structure Stablecoins, securities, and the rules being written in Washington
- Stablecoin
- Private money that promises to hold its dollar value: a company holds real dollars in reserve, and the token is your receipt you can trade back for those dollars anytime. Digital paper, not government money.
- CBDC
- Central Bank Digital Currency — actual government money in digital form, a direct liability of the central bank. The key distinction: a stablecoin is a private company's promise; a CBDC is the government's own obligation.
- GENIUS Act
- Signed law since July 2025: created the federal framework for payment stablecoins, requiring 1:1 reserve backing and federal oversight.
- CLARITY Act
- The market-structure bill deciding which regulator (SEC or CFTC) oversees which digital assets — the fix for overlapping law without clear lanes.
- Cloture
- The Senate procedure that overcomes a filibuster, requiring 60 votes. A cloture vote on the motion to proceed decides only whether the Senate debates a bill — it passes nothing.
- Bitcoin
- The original cryptocurrency: decentralized, fixed supply of 21 million, no founder in charge — which is why regulators have consistently treated it as a commodity.
- Altcoins
- The other legitimate crypto projects — real teams, real use cases, real governance, from Ethereum on down.
- Shitcoins
- Tokens with no utility and no honest team behind them, existing mostly to enrich their creators. The label isn't about age or size — it's about whether there's anything underneath the hype.