The core set
HODL: hold, from a 2013 typo, meaning to keep an asset through a decline.
FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt, used to label negative information.
ATH: all-time high, the highest price ever reached.
FOMO: fear of missing out, the impulse to buy because a price is rising.
DYOR: do your own research, usually appended to a recommendation as a
disclaimer.
Those five cover most conversations. The rest is decoration, and much of it is generated
weekly and forgotten just as fast, which is worth knowing before treating fluency in it as
evidence of anything.
Whale, shrimp, bagholder
A whale holds enough to move the price. A shrimp holds very little. A bagholder is left with an asset after everyone else exited, and it is the only one of the three that is purely pejorative, and the one people are most reluctant to apply to themselves.
Rug pull, exit scam, soft rug
A rug pull is the team removing liquidity so the token cannot be sold. An exit scam is the same act applied to a business rather than a token. A soft rug is abandonment without theft, which is legally different and financially identical.
Diamond hands, paper hands
Praise for holding through a decline and contempt for selling. The pair is the clearest example of vocabulary that encodes an argument: one behaviour is a virtue, its opposite is a weakness, and no circumstance is admitted where selling was correct.
Moon, ape in, degen
To moon is to rise sharply. To ape in is to buy a large position quickly without research. A degen embraces that as an identity. The self-deprecation is real and it also normalises the behaviour it describes.
What the vocabulary is doing
Consider what has a word and what does not. There is a term for selling too early and none for
holding too long. Rich language for enthusiasm and a single dismissive label for scepticism.
A word that turns a decline into a purchase opportunity and no equivalent for a decline that
simply continued.
That asymmetry is not accidental and it is not exactly a conspiracy either. It is what happens when a vocabulary is developed by people who are long. Using it fluently means
importing its assumptions, which is fine as long as you can see them.
The one worth watching
FUD. It is the word that converts a factual claim into a motive, and it is deployed most
heavily against the most specific criticisms. When a concrete statement (a missed deadline, a wallet movement, an unanswered question about reserves) is answered with the label rather
than with a rebuttal, the label is the rebuttal, and it is not one.
The terms that describe real mechanics
A handful are not attitude but vocabulary for things that actually exist. Gas
is the fee paid for computation on a network. Slippage is the gap between
expected and executed price. Airdrop is a distribution of tokens to addresses
meeting some condition. Staking is committing an asset to secure a network in
return for a yield.
These are worth learning properly, because each names a mechanism with consequences. Confusing
them with the attitudinal vocabulary is easy, since both arrive in the same sentences from the
same people, and the difference is whether the word points at something that would still be
there if everyone stopped talking.
The words that describe a market structure
A second group of terms is doing something different from the cheerleading vocabulary. They
name real features of how this market is arranged, and they are worth knowing because the
features are worth knowing.
A whale is a holder large enough that their trading moves the price rather than following it.
That is a statement about depth, not about wealth, and it is why the same position size is a
whale on one asset and unremarkable on another. Liquidity is the related idea from the other
direction: how much can be bought or sold before the price shifts against you. Slippage is what
you pay when the answer is not much.
Unlock refers to a scheduled release of supply that was allocated but not yet circulating,
usually to a team or to early investors. Burn is the opposite operation, sending units to an
address nobody can spend from. Both are checkable against the chain rather than against a
claim, which puts them in a different class from most of the vocabulary on this page.
Rug pull names an outcome instead of a mechanism, and that vagueness is a problem. Withdrawn
liquidity, an abandoned project and an outright theft all get the same label, and they are
different events with different warning signs. The useful habit is to ask which of the three
someone means before treating their account as a precedent.
A note on how fast it turns over
Most of this vocabulary has a half-life measured in months. Terms appear, saturate and become
markers of having arrived at a particular moment rather than of understanding anything. The
core set at the top of this page has lasted a decade; almost everything invented since has
not.
Which is a reason not to work at fluency. Being able to read the vocabulary is useful; adopting
it is how a reader ends up importing a set of assumptions along with the words, and the
assumptions outlast the slang.
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