by Top team

Crypto slang: wagmi, ngmi, gm and 62 more terms

Most crypto slang guides tell you what the words mean. This one also tells you when each word was first written down, and the receipts say the popular origin stories are late by years.

Every glossary of crypto slang tells you that wagmi means "we're all gonna make it" and that gm means "good morning". Fine. Nobody checks the second half of the claim, the part about where the words came from, and the second half is where the guides fall apart.

We checked it. For 55 terms we went into the public archive of 4chan's /biz/ board, found the earliest post the archive holds for each word, read that post, and kept the date only when the word was standing in the meaning this article is about. Below that measurement sits the dictionary itself, 65 terms in five layers, and the receipts disagree with the standard history by years.

ngmi is being thrown as an insult on 3 August 2017, in a post that reads "If you have to ask, you're ngmi". Know Your Meme dates the crypto adoption of ngmi to a Reddit post in May 2021. That is a gap of 45 months.

What we measured, and what we could not

The measurement is narrow on purpose, so read the shape of it before the numbers.

The corpus is the warosu archive of /biz/, the business and finance board of 4chan, which is where a large part of this vocabulary was in daily use before it reached Twitter. The archive's own first day is 13 February 2014, measured by running the same search on the control word "bitcoin". Anything that was already in circulation before that date is invisible to us: it shows up in the first week and cannot be dated.

Search matches a string, not a meaning, so every earliest post was opened and read by a person before its date was accepted. That step removed 22 of the 55 words. The earliest "gm" on the board is a conversation about General Motors, the earliest "sniper" is about a video game, the earliest "nfa" is the National Futures Association, and the earliest "maxi" is an Australian talking about cereal advertising.

Four multi-word phrases never matched at all, because the archive's search looks for words rather than phrases: "paper hands", "up only", "when lambo" and "few understand" get no verified hit and are dated in the dictionary below from other sources, not from ours.

One term was found, dated, and then dropped on purpose. It is in wide use, and its origin is an ethnic slur, so it is not in the dictionary. Saying that out loud is better than leaving a hole and calling the list complete.

The receipts

Sixteen terms whose earliest archived post uses the word in the sense this article describes. The quotes are copied from the linked posts exactly as written, including the typos, and trimmed at a sentence boundary. Nothing is paraphrased.

Two of these deserve to be read twice.

Diamond hands, 31 May 2017. The post is a man explaining that he sold 6 BTC at $200 after the Mt. Gox hack, and that the memory made him hold everything since. That is the exact modern meaning of the phrase, sitting in a crypto context, three years and eight months before the GameStop squeeze that dictionaries file it under.

Rug pull, 16 December 2017. "hmmm a rugpull on the new chasers is definitely possible". The phrase is normally described as DeFi-summer vocabulary from 2020. It was already a compound noun during the ICO mania.

Positive bars mean the word was in use on the board before the date the standard story gives. HODL is the one term whose documented birth is older than the archive itself: it was posted to bitcointalk on 18 December 2013, by a user called GameKyuubi, who explained his own typo in the thread with the line "I type d that tyitle twice because I knew it was wrong the first time. Still wrong w/e." It reaches /biz/ two months later.

The dictionary, in five layers

The rest of this article is the dictionary. It is grouped by what the words are for rather than alphabetically, because the grouping is the argument: a market's vocabulary starts as feeling and ends as mechanics.

The greeting layer

These words do not carry information. They mark you as inside, and that is the whole job.

gm stands for good morning, and it is a daily roll call rather than a greeting. You post gm, people reply gm, and the ritual says the group is still here. The earliest NFT-circle use Know Your Meme can document is a tweet from March 2018; the habit went mainstream on crypto Twitter through 2021. Our archive cannot date it, because "gm" is also a car company.

gn is good night, the same ritual at the other end of the day. First archived use in that sense: 5 March 2014.

ser is a deliberate misspelling of "sir", used to address a stranger with mock formality. It arrived through crypto Telegram and Discord support channels and stuck because it is funny in both directions: respectful and clearly not.

fren is friend, spelled the way the Pepe cartoons spell it. First archived use, 25 October 2016: "Well mem'ed my fren".

anon is short for anonymous and means "you, the person I am talking to". Everyone is anon until they are somebody.

CT is Crypto Twitter, the permanent, sleepless argument that most of this vocabulary comes from. It now means the same crowd on X.

iykyk is "if you know, you know", a way of hinting at information without stating it. First archived use, 11 May 2019, as a one-word post.

touch grass is an instruction to leave the screen. First archived use, 30 May 2022, in a post telling the board that markets are closed today.

based means an opinion held without asking for permission. It came out of 4chan, not crypto, and it is a compliment.

The conviction layer

Words that state a position on the future, usually louder than the position deserves.

hodl is holding, misspelled, and it means refusing to sell through a drawdown. The receipt is the bitcointalk post of 18 December 2013 written during a crash by a man who says in the thread that he had been drinking. It survived because it turns a lack of trading skill into a strategy, which is a very useful thing for a word to do.

wagmi is "we're all gonna make it". It is optimism used as glue: the point is not the prediction, it is the "we". The phrase belongs to the bodybuilder Aziz Shavershian, known as Zyzz, who died in 2011, and it lived in fitness forums for years before it reached markets. First archived use on /biz/, 28 July 2018.

ngmi is "not gonna make it", the same sentence inverted and pointed at a person. It is the harshest thing crypto Twitter says to anyone, because it is not about being wrong, it is about being the kind of person who will keep being wrong. First archived use, 3 August 2017.

gmi is "gonna make it", the singular form, usually said to someone who just did something right.

diamond hands means holding a position through pain. paper hands means selling into the first scare. Both are usually credited to r/wallstreetbets around 2019 and the GameStop squeeze of January 2021; the crypto usage on the board is older, 31 May 2017.

hfsp is "have fun staying poor", the standard reply to a person who says the whole thing is a scam. First archived use, 30 December 2020.

up only is a joke about a chart that supposedly cannot fall. It is always said about something that then falls.

number go up is the same joke made honest: a thesis that the price rises because people expect the price to rise. Often shortened to NgU.

few or few understand is an ironic sign-off meaning "almost nobody sees what I see". It is widely credited to the pseudonymous writer @BowTiedBull; we could not find a dated first post, so we are flagging that as attribution, not evidence.

probably nothing is the same irony worn the other way round: you post something you consider important and label it unimportant. Our archive gives no usable date for it, because the plain-English sense of the phrase is everywhere.

The loss layer

The largest group, which is the honest part. A market vocabulary describes losing far more precisely than winning.

rekt is wrecked: a position destroyed, usually with leverage. The spelling comes out of gaming, where Urban Dictionary has it in 2011 and World of Warcraft forums in 2012, and crypto picked it up whole. It is already in use on the archive's first day.

bagholder is somebody left holding a token nobody wants; the bags are the position itself. First archived use of bagholder, 14 February 2014, and the post is an insult, which is the natural habitat of the word.

cope is refusing to accept a loss out loud. copium is the imaginary drug you take to do it. First archived use of copium, 25 September 2018: "Pass the copium anon".

hopium is the same substance aimed at the future rather than the past: a position held on hope alone.

fud is "fear, uncertainty and doubt". The term predates crypto by decades, it comes from computer sales, and it changed jobs on the way in: outside crypto it describes a tactic, inside crypto it is mostly used to dismiss criticism, including true criticism.

fomo is "fear of missing out", the reason most bad entries happen. First archived use in a trading sense, 13 June 2014: "now i have to buy nautilus coin because of FOMO".

exit liquidity is what you are called when your buying lets somebody else sell. It is the most useful term in this section and the least flattering.

rug pull is a launch where the team removes the liquidity and the token goes to zero. A soft rug is the slower version, where nobody removes anything and the team simply stops working. exit scam is the older, broader word for the same crime.

honeypot is a token you can buy but not sell, because the contract says so.

The trading floor

Vocabulary that would survive a move to any other market.

If a word in that table sends you looking for the mechanics rather than the joke, the desk keeps a plain-language glossary for the machinery underneath: funding rate, liquidation, perpetual futures, FDV.

The 2024 to 2026 layer: memecoin desk slang

This is the part that other glossaries skip, and it is the part in daily use right now. These words came out of Solana launchpads, they describe execution mechanics rather than feelings, and almost none of them can be dated in our archive, because each one is an ordinary English word wearing a new job.

the trenches is the memecoin market itself: brand new tokens, minutes old, most of them worthless. Being "in the trenches" means trading launches all day. Our own census of that market is in what happens in a token's first thirty seconds, where almost half of everything ever paid for a pump.fun token arrives in the first half minute.

CTO is community takeover: the original developer walks away or is exposed, and the remaining holders take over the accounts and the marketing to keep the token alive.

bundled describes a launch where a group of wallets, funded together, buy the supply in the first block, so the holder list looks broad and is not.

sniper is a bot or a person who buys in the first seconds of a launch, usually with advance knowledge. sniped is what happened to everyone else.

dev sold is the three-word obituary: the creator sold their allocation.

migration is the moment a token graduates from its launchpad curve to an open market, which is a scheduled liquidity event and therefore a scheduled trap.

runner is the one launch in thousands that keeps rising instead of dying.

meta is whatever theme the market is buying this week: animals, politics, AI agents. The meta rotates faster than any thesis about it.

cabal is a private group of traders who coordinate entries, which may or may not exist in the specific case being complained about.

PVP is player versus player: an admission that the token has no plan and the money simply moves between traders.

farmer is somebody working an airdrop rather than a position.

What the other side says

There is a real argument about whether any of this should exist, and it has been running since the words got popular. Both sides are worth quoting because both are right about something.

The complaint is not really about the syllable. It is that a greeting with no content works as a loyalty test: post gm and you are one of us, question the asset and you are ngmi. A vocabulary that sorts people that way is very good at manufacturing consensus, and consensus is the thing a market is supposed to price, not perform.

The defence is that the ritual is doing a job no other part of the market does. Traders sit alone, at odd hours, holding positions they cannot discuss with anyone in their house. A word that costs nothing and confirms other humans are awake is a cheap fix for a real problem.

Our reading of the receipts sits between the two. The greeting layer is social, the loss layer is technical, and the second one is what a trader actually needs. Nobody ever got liquidated for not saying gm; plenty of people got liquidated without knowing what exit liquidity meant.

What we cannot see

Not a disclaimer. A list of the questions our own data cannot answer, and which way each one bends the result.

One board is not the language. The archive is /biz/. Words that were born on Twitter, in Telegram or in Discord reach it late or never, so every date here is an upper bound on the age of the word, never a lower one. If we are wrong about a date, the word is older than we say, not younger.

The archive floor hides thirteen terms. hodl, rekt, fud, shill, shitcoin, dyor, sats, bagholder, degen, nocoiner, airdrop, anon and based were all in use in the archive's first week. Their real first use is somewhere before 13 February 2014, and we cannot say where.

Polysemy defeats string search. For 22 terms the earliest match is a different word wearing the same letters. For those we have no date at all, and the dictionary entries above use secondary sources, which we flag where it matters.

We did not measure how often anything is used. We know when a word appears, not how popular it became. Frequency would need a corpus with a fixed denominator, and the public interfaces that used to provide one, Pushshift and its successors, now refuse automated access. We tried three and got rate-limited by all three; that is why there is no popularity chart in this piece.

Definitions are editorial. The meanings are ours, checked against usage. Slang has no authority to appeal to, and anyone who tells you their crypto glossary is definitive is selling something.

What would have to be true for us to be wrong

• A dated public post using ngmi in the crypto sense before 3 August 2017, or wagmi before 28 July 2018, anywhere. That would not break the finding, it would strengthen it: the gap to the popular story gets larger.
• The reverse: evidence that our 2017 ngmi post means something else. The post is one line and the meaning is plain, but it is a single line, and single lines can be misread.
• A demonstration that the warosu archive backfilled posts, so that its 13 February 2014 floor is not a real floor. That would move the entire floor cohort.
• An origin story that turns out to be dated correctly and to predate the board, as HODL does. We found one. There may be more.

Corrections made along the way

The first version of this measurement dated gmi to 5 April 2016 and treated it as the earliest word in the family. Reading the post killed it: it is about General Moly Inc, ticker GMI, a molybdenum mining company. The date was removed rather than footnoted, because a wrong receipt is worse than no receipt.

The same check removed trenches, CTO, bundled, sniper, PVP, cabal, cope, maxi, wen, whale, bags, moon, aping, larp, hopium, ser, rug, gm, nfa and two others from the dated set. In an earlier pass, before the sense check existed, all of them were counted, and the article would have claimed that the entire modern memecoin vocabulary existed in February 2014.

The desk's view

Slang is a compression protocol, and the compression ratio is the point. "I am long, I will not sell into this drawdown, and I accept I may be wrong" is sixteen words. "Diamond hands" is two. In a market that trades every hour of every day, the group that can state a position in two words moves faster than the group that needs sixteen, and that speed advantage is why this vocabulary keeps regenerating instead of settling.

What we now do differently is small and concrete. When the desk writes about a market it will use the word the market uses and define it once, in place, rather than translating it into institutional English. We had been doing the opposite, on the theory that jargon excludes readers. The receipts here say something else: the jargon is the primary source. A reader who does not know what "bundled" means cannot read a launch, and no amount of careful paraphrase fixes that.

The number we will keep watching is the arrival rate of new terms in the memecoin layer. Between 2014 and 2020 the board produced roughly one durable term a year. The 2024 to 2026 layer produced at least eleven in two years, and every one of them describes an execution mechanic rather than a feeling. That is a market telling you where its risk moved: from conviction to microstructure.

And one specific thing to check behind us. Open the 3 August 2017 ngmi post and the 31 May 2017 diamond hands post. If either of them is not what we say it is, that is the finding, and we will publish the correction the same way we published the claim.

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