Crypto Acronyms, Decoded

Crypto has its own language, and nobody hands you a phrasebook at the door. Here it is: the greetings, the trading slang, the degen vocabulary and the Solana-specific terms, in plain English.

Curious where all this came from? Read our field guide to speaking crypto.

Greetings & Culture

gm: Good morning. The universal crypto greeting, posted at any hour, in any timezone. Replying gm is how strangers become frens.
gn: Good night. gm's quieter sibling.
wagmi: We're All Gonna Make It. Crypto's rallying cry of collective optimism, borrowed from Australian bodybuilder Zyzz.
ngmi: Not Gonna Make It. The opposite of wagmi; a verdict on bad decisions, usually someone else's.
gmi: Gonna Make It. Personal-scale wagmi.
ser: Sir, deliberately misspelled. A mock-formal way to address anyone: 'ser, this is a casino.'
anon: Anonymous. How you address someone whose real name you don't know, which is nearly everyone.
fren: Friend, in internet-speak. Cuter and lower-stakes than the real word.
wen: When, misspelled on purpose. Used to demand timelines: wen token, wen mainnet, wen lambo.
LFG: Let's Go, with an F in the middle for emphasis. Deployed at launches, listings and green candles.
IYKYK: If You Know, You Know. A wink at insider context.
based: Admirably true to your convictions, indifferent to popular opinion.
alpha: Valuable non-public insight or an information edge. 'Sharing alpha' is crypto's love language.
cope: The stories we tell ourselves when our bags are down.
CT: Crypto Twitter. The industry's town square, group chat and rumour mill, now on X.
OG: Original Gangster. Someone who was here in the early days and has the scars (or coins) to prove it.
IRL: In Real Life. Where meetups happen and laptops close.
touch grass: Advice to log off and go outside. Prescribed after excessive chart-watching.

Trading Floor

HODL: Hold, immortalised by a typo in a 2013 Bitcointalk post. Later backronymed to Hold On for Dear Life.
ATH: All-Time High. The price everyone remembers buying below, few actually did.
ATL: All-Time Low. Mentioned less often, for some reason.
FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. The emotion that buys tops.
FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Negative information, real or manufactured. Predates crypto by decades.
DYOR: Do Your Own Research. Both genuine advice and a liability disclaimer.
NFA: Not Financial Advice. The three letters that precede a great deal of financial advice.
BTFD: Buy The (F) Dip. A strategy that works right up until it doesn't.
TA: Technical Analysis. Drawing lines on charts; occasionally predictive, always confident.
mcap: Market capitalisation: token price multiplied by circulating supply.
PnL: Profit and Loss. Screenshot-worthy when green, private when red.
bags: Your token holdings, especially large or underwater ones.
bagholder: Someone still holding after everyone else sold. Nobody plans to become one.
exit liquidity: The buyers who let earlier holders sell. An insult when aimed at you.
diamond hands: Refusing to sell through volatility. GameStop-era slang that crypto adopted instantly.
paper hands: Selling at the first sign of trouble. The opposite of diamond hands.
mooning: A price going vertical. Destination: the moon.
wen lambo: The ironic question of when profits will convert to a Lamborghini. The answer is usually never.
whale: A holder large enough to move the market when they sneeze.
capitulation: The moment the last optimists give up. Often, in hindsight, the bottom.
top signal: Behaviour so euphoric it suggests the market has peaked. Taxi drivers giving coin picks, and so on.
up only: The belief, held briefly each cycle, that prices no longer go down.

Degen Dictionary

degen: Degenerate, worn as a badge of honour. Someone who takes risks that would horrify their accountant.
ape: To buy in fast and big without research. 'I aped' explains many portfolios.
rekt: Wrecked. What happens to leveraged positions and those who aped wrong.
rug / rug pull: When a team drains the liquidity and disappears. To be rugged is to learn an expensive lesson.
jeet: Someone who sells early and often. Unkind, widely used.
shill: To promote a token relentlessly, usually with undisclosed motives.
larp: Live Action Role Play. Pretending to be something you're not, like profitable.
moonbag: A small holding kept after taking profit, in case it moons.
PvP: Player versus Player. A market where traders extract from each other rather than from growth.
snipe: To buy a token in the first blocks after launch, faster than any human can click.
honeypot: A token contract that lets you buy but never sell. The name explains the strategy.
vaporware: A product that exists in announcements only.
floor price: The cheapest listed item in an NFT collection. The collective ego of its holders.
PFP: Profile Picture. NFT collections made to be worn as your online face.
mint: To create a new token or NFT onchain; also the act of buying one at creation.
sweep the floor: Buying up an NFT collection's cheapest listings in bulk.

Tech & Builders

DeFi: Decentralised Finance. Financial services rebuilt as onchain programs, no bank branch required.
NFT: Non-Fungible Token. A unique onchain asset: art, membership, tickets, identity.
DAO: Decentralised Autonomous Organisation. A community with a shared treasury and onchain voting.
DEX: Decentralised Exchange. Swap tokens directly from your wallet.
CEX: Centralised Exchange. Someone else holds your coins; convenient until it isn't.
AMM: Automated Market Maker. The pricing math that lets DEXs work without order books.
TVL: Total Value Locked. How much capital sits in a protocol; DeFi's favourite scoreboard.
L1 / L2: Layer 1, a base blockchain like Solana; Layer 2, a network built on top of one.
EVM: Ethereum Virtual Machine. Ethereum's runtime, and the standard many other chains copy.
RPC: Remote Procedure Call. The endpoint your wallet or app uses to talk to the blockchain.
TPS: Transactions Per Second. Throughput, and the source of endless chain-versus-chain arguments.
LST: Liquid Staking Token. Stake your SOL, receive a token that keeps earning while staying spendable.
TGE: Token Generation Event. The moment a token officially exists and starts trading.
airdrop: Free tokens distributed to users, usually to reward early activity.
vesting / cliff: The schedule that stops insiders selling everything on day one. A cliff is the waiting period before any unlock.
multisig: A wallet requiring multiple signatures to move funds. Fewer single points of failure, or blame.
seed phrase: The 12 or 24 words that ARE your wallet. Never type them anywhere. Ever.
cold wallet: Keys kept offline, away from the internet and its temptations.
smart contract: Code that holds and moves money by itself. On Solana, called a program.
oracle: A service that feeds real-world data, like prices, onto the chain.
bridge: Infrastructure that moves assets between blockchains.
MEV: Maximal Extractable Value. Profit extracted by reordering transactions; the invisible tax of onchain trading.

Solana Speak

SPL: Solana Program Library. The token standard: what ERC-20 is to Ethereum, SPL is to Solana.
PoH: Proof of History. Solana's cryptographic clock, the trick behind its speed.
OPOS: Only Possible On Solana. Shorthand for apps that need Solana's speed and fees to exist.
PDA: Program Derived Address. An account owned by a program instead of a person; how Solana apps store state.
CPI: Cross-Program Invocation. One Solana program calling another; composability in action.
epoch: Roughly two days in Solana time. Staking rewards and validator schedules run on it.
validator: A node that processes transactions and secures the network.
priority fee: A small tip to jump the queue when the network is busy.
Seeker: Solana's crypto-native mobile phone, successor to the Saga.
blinks: Blockchain links. URLs that unfurl into Solana transactions anywhere links work.
Superteam: The global network of Solana talent collectives, including Superteam Australia.
Firedancer: The independent validator client built by Jump, designed to make Solana faster and more resilient.