Basic ‘Cryptospeak’ Words

APE: To buy into a new coin or token — particularly when you don’t know much about it but feel driven by FOMO: “I need to ape into this NFT before the price shoots through the roof!”

BAGS: The coins and tokens in your portfolio. If you hold on to your coins until they become worthless, you’re unfortunately a bagholder.

DAO: Decentralized Autonomous Organization. At its most basic level, a DAO is just a decentralized way to organize a group of people — like a digital co-op with a shared bank account. There’s no leader or CEO who makes decisions; instead, you might bring a proposal to the DAO, and everyone who holds a token gets to vote. Some DAOs operate like start-ups, others invest in founders or NFTs, and others exist just to hang out. In November, ten friends created a DAO to buy a first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction. Within a week, they gathered 17,000 members and $45 million in funding, only to be outbid by the CEO of the hedge fund Citadel.

FUD: “Fear, uncertainty, doubt,” a catchall phrase for any kind of negativity, criticism, or bad news about a crypto-currency (even if it happens to be true). When powerful enough, FUD can cause panic sales of tokens: “Jamie Dimon is calling bitcoin a bubble that’s about to pop — he’s spreading FUD again.”

MOON: If a coin is mooning, that means its price is soaring.

NOCOINER OR NORMIE: A skeptic who has stayed out of the crypto market, either from sheer bewilderment or the suspicion that it’s a giant pyramid scheme. A tweet from @Gemsays: “A nocoiner normie friend found my Twitter & said ‘you look like a crazy person trying to start an internet anti-establishment cult.’ ”

PROOF OF WORK: The process by which the earliest cryptocurrencies (like bitcoin) are mined. It’s extremely energy-intensive, requiring powerful computers that race to solve elaborate sudoku like puzzles to compete for tokens.

PROOF OF STAKE: An alternative process that doesn’t require miners and uses much less energy. More and more new currencies are adopting proof-of-stake technology. Ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency, has committed to migrating its entire network to proof of stake by 2022.

RUG PULL: A scam in which developers raise a lot of money for a crypto project, then disappear with all of it. One of the most notorious rug pulls took place in 2018, when a start-up called Prodeum, after receiving a modest amount of funding, disappeared with all of the users’ money and left only the word penis on its home page.

WAGMI: “We’re all gonna make it” is a rallying cry, an expression of camaraderie and optimism. Often used after something good has happened: “I bought this NFT early, and now it’s mooning. WAGMI.” Its opposite is NGMI, or “Not gonna make it,” which describes a person or entity that made a bad decision and is doomed to failure: “God, I missed out on this NFT drop! NGMI” or “Facebook’s Meta rebrand is so cringe. NGMI.”

WEB2: The internet as we know it today, which is dominated by a few large tech companies, like Facebook, Amazon, and Google, that provide services in exchange for personal data (and, in turn, control what happens to our data — how it’s stored, used, tracked, and monetized).

WEB3: Right now, it’s more of a utopian vision than a reality. Web3, a favorite buzzword of many crypto enthusiasts, is a decentralized version of the internet that runs on a blockchain. In this version, you would be a stakeholder in any entity you contribute to online (so if Facebook had started as a Web3 project, you might have been earning equity — tokens — for all those hours you’ve spent on it since 2006). Think of it as a rebrand of crypto.

WHALE: A person or institution that holds such an enormous amount of a certain crypto-currency that whenever they buy or sell, they’re able to move the market (when a whale makes a large crypto transaction, that’s known as a whale movement). Many whales choose to remain mysterious. Nobody knows, for example, the identity of the world’s largest dogecoin holder, who has collected 39.6 billion doge since 2019 (about 30 percent of the total supply).

WHITE PAPER: You can’t found a serious blockchain project or cryptocurrency without publishing a white paper, which serves as both a technical introduction as well as a manifesto for what problem you want to solve. Often long and dense.