Talk crypto to me

Gm. It’s a beautiful day to break down blockchain slang, because surfing a Web3 Discord channel can feel a lot like opening up. A Clockwork Orange to a random page and trying to figure out what a Knifey Moloko is. If we lost you on “gm”, then you’re in the right place. (It means “good morning,” btw.)

The crypto community has developed its own hyperspecific language to chat about the latest NFT drop or SEC regulation. Crypto’s insider lectures have made it easier to communicate on blockchain – specific topics. Instead of unpacking what a non-fungal token is or ignoring the definition of a “digital asset”, you can simply say NFT. The language is fun and binds the community, but for outsiders it can be a high level to get into.

This is partly because many crypto projects use Discord as a communication hub. Discord has only 150 million monthly active users globally, 79% of whom come from outside the United States. This means that the base is much smaller than Pinterest (433 million) and Twitter (approximately 450 million), let alone Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. In addition, for most communities, users must receive an invitation to join each private “server”. There is no way to accidentally trick a server like you would on a subreddit; you must have the golden ticket to see the chocolate avenue. The only way you can access Bored Ape group chat is to purchase an NFT, which can cost up to $ 3.4 million. But there you get at least say «gm» to Paris Hilton. Use language to distinguish us and them is not new: Almost all niche communities do. Lexicographer Jonathon Green has spent his career studying English slang and attributes the first known use to criminal groups that were in operation 500 years ago who wanted to kill the authorities with small talk. Nowadays, snowboarders bomb, consultants will circle back on your EOD ping, and players have the perfect construction for their favorite, roguelike action-dungeon-crawler.

The crypto-lexicon recently experienced a seismic shift when crypto prices plummeted and tore off society’s pink laser eyes, so the language is changing rapidly. As much as it can create a sense of community, it also keeps it from outsiders. To help lower that gate, we’ve put together a selection of terms that have been floating to the top of blockchain chats lately, as well as others that have passed their heyday. This little list goes beyond the basics of the concepts we see most often and the ones that are most often misunderstood.

• dApp. Decentralized applications are open source software apps. While a traditional app runs on centralized servers, a dApp is built on blockchain-supported networks, often the Ethereum platform (it’s more than just a cryptocurrency). Like traditional applications, a dApps function can vary from personal finance to gaming.
• Fiat. If you have only used “traditional” currencies linked to a government, you may not be aware that they are formally known as fiat. The dollars? It’s fiat. With crypto becoming increasingly popular, this distinction between crypto and fiat is important.
• Gm. Literally “good morning.” Figuratively, it means that you are part of the crypto scene. All from Pepsi to Shaq has tweeted the little sentence, and some Discord channels have entire channels dedicated to just saying it, on repeat, forever.
• KYC. “Know your customer” is a process that screens investors to give them access to, for example, buy an NFT right when it falls. It is also used as a verb: “Get KYC’d.”
• Carpet cover. A specific type of scam where a developer (usually anonymous, which is the norm in crypto) attracts investors to a project and then takes all the money without looking through the project, and pulls the rug out from under investors. ICYMI: Crypto is full of scams like this. Variations such as “robust” are also common.
• Greetings emoji or 🫡. Emojipedia says that the greeting face emoji is “used as a sign of respect.” Bitcoin enthusiast and author Zack Voell told Morning Brew that crypto enthusiasts in particular use it as a signal to convey “we are all in this; just hang there. “

• Whale. A crypto whale is any individual or entity that owns a significant portion (usually 10% or more) of a particular cryptocurrency – so much so that when a whale loses its stake, it affects the price of the currency. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried are two of the biggest whales today.

Currently: With a Turbo Drop dip in cryptocurrencies, some of the happier languages ​​have lost popularity.

• Diamond hands or 💎🙌. Diamond hands originated in the infamous subreddit r / WallStreetBets in early 2021. It indicated that an investor kept their volatile assets confident that it would make them rich. There is still a remnant of the crypto abundance before 2022.
• HFSP. Voell said that “having fun staying poor” or HFSP is out of fashion “because we are all poor now with lower prices.”
• Hodl. “Hold on for dear life” is a collective call to keep your investments instead of selling them, with the tacit understanding that they will become more valuable. With lower cryptocurrencies, investors do not seem to feel optimistic enough to use this term as much as they used to.
• WGMI or wagmi. The acronym for “we’re all gonna make it” is in disgrace because, as Blockchain Capital investor and founder of the NFT platform Minotaur Sterling Campbell told us, “We realized that not everyone was going to make it.”

This is by no means an exhaustive glossary of blockchain terms, and some of them may shrink over the course of months (perhaps they are already creeping up). Share your favorites that we missed here.