gm, wagmi, ngmi: A Field Guide to Speaking Crypto

Walk into any Solana meetup in Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland and you will hear English being spoken, mostly. But threaded through it is a second language: gm, wagmi, rekt, ape, ser. To outsiders it sounds like keyboard mashing. To insiders it is a handshake, a filter and a shared history compressed into two to five letters.

We built a full glossary for the reference shelf. This is the story behind the words.

It Started With a Typo

The founding document of crypto slang is a drunk forum post. In December 2013, with bitcoin's price falling hard, a Bitcointalk user named GameKyuubi hammered out a defiant thread titled "I AM HODLING", misspelling "holding" and admitting to the whisky responsible. The typo outlived the crash. HODL became crypto's first article of faith, later dressed up with a respectable backronym, Hold On for Dear Life, and it set the pattern for everything that followed: crypto's language is written by its worst moments, then worn with pride.

Not everything was born onchain. FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt, was computer-industry vocabulary decades before bitcoin existed, coined to describe how incumbents scare customers away from competitors. Diamond hands and paper hands crossed over from Reddit's WallStreetBets during the GameStop mania of early 2021. Rekt walked in from gaming. Crypto is a magpie: it steals whatever vocabulary is shiny and useful.

Australia's Greatest Crypto Export

Here is the part your non-crypto mates will not believe: wagmi, the most optimistic phrase in the entire lexicon, is arguably Australian. "We're all gonna make it" was the catchphrase of Aziz Shavershian, the Sydney bodybuilder and internet phenomenon known as Zyzz, years before most crypto users had heard of a blockchain. After his death in 2011 the phrase became a legacy meme in fitness communities, migrated through 4chan's business boards and WallStreetBets, and by 2021 had been adopted wholesale by crypto as its collective war cry. Its pessimistic twin, ngmi, followed naturally.

There is something fitting about a phrase from Sydney's gym culture becoming the emotional backbone of a global financial movement. Optimism as a group activity translates across both.

Why gm Took Over the World

The strangest ritual in crypto is also the simplest. Every day, millions of people say good morning to strangers on the internet, at all hours, across every timezone, abbreviated to two letters. gm works precisely because it carries no information. It is what linguists call phatic communication, speech whose entire job is social connection: a nod across the bar, a wave to a neighbour. In a pseudonymous industry where you may never learn anyone's real name, gm is how a market becomes a community.

The rest of the culture stack works the same way. Calling someone ser or fren, asking wen token, replying LFG to good news: none of it conveys data. All of it conveys membership.

The Degen Lexicon Is a Risk Warning

Look closely at the trading vocabulary and you notice something: most of it describes losing. Rekt, rugged, bagholder, exit liquidity, jeet, cope, ngmi. The language is a map of every way money disappears onchain, drawn by people who found out personally. Even the jokes are actuarial: wen lambo is funny because the lambo never comes.

That makes the slang oddly honest. An industry routinely accused of hiding risk has built a vernacular that talks about almost nothing else. When someone says they aped into a memecoin and got rekt, every word of that sentence is a disclosure.

Solana Has Its Own Dialect

Ecosystems develop accents. On Solana, OPOS, Only Possible On Solana, is both a hashtag-free boast and a design philosophy: if your app does not need sub-second finality and sub-cent fees, it could live anywhere; if it does, it lives here. SPL is the token standard, PoH the cryptographic clock that makes the speed possible, blinks the links that turn any URL into a transaction. Builders will also meet PDAs and CPIs, the grammar of Solana programs. Learn a handful of these and you can follow any conversation at a Solana ANZ event; the glossary has the rest.

Jargon Is a Door, Not a Wall

It is easy to read crypto speak as gatekeeping, and sometimes it is. But mostly it works the other way: the language is one of the few parts of crypto with no buy-in price. You cannot fake a track record, but you can say gm on day one and be answered. For newcomers across Australia and New Zealand, learning the vocabulary is the cheapest onboarding in the industry, and the fastest way to discover that behind the acronyms are people worth knowing.

Bookmark the glossary, bring it to your next meetup, and when in doubt, open with gm. Everyone did, once.

Written by the Solana ANZ team. Nothing here is financial advice. Do your own research.