Crypto Slang Explained: HODL, FOMO, Rug Pull and More

Crypto slang is mostly ordinary ideas wearing strange clothes. HODL means hold and do not sell. FOMO is buying because everyone else is. A rug pull is a team taking the money and vanishing. Learn a few dozen words and the conversation stops sounding like a foreign language - here is the slang explained, starting with what you will meet first.

Words about holding and trading

• HODL - hold on, do not sell. It started as a typo for "hold" in a 2013 forum post and stuck.
• FOMO - fear of missing out, the feeling that makes people buy at the top.
• FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt: bad news, honest or not, used to scare people out.
• Bag - whatever you own. A bagholder is someone left with a coin nobody wants.
• Whale - someone holding enough to move the price on their own.
• Degen - short for degenerate: someone taking wild risks, usually said with affection.

Words about the technology

Gas is the fee you pay to use Ethereum, named because it fuels the work. Minting means creating a new token or NFT. Burning means sending coins to an address nobody can open, taking them out of circulation for good. A bridge moves tokens from one network to another. DYOR is do your own research, and wagmi - "we're all gonna make it" - is cheerful noise rather than analysis.

Words that are really warnings

Some slang describes the ways people lose money, and those are the terms worth memorising. A rug pull is a team draining a token's liquidity and disappearing. A honeypot is a token you can buy but not sell. Aping in means buying without reading anything first. Shilling is promoting a coin because you own it. When a stranger in a chat uses three of these words to explain why you should hurry, that is your warning.

Keep one rule beside the vocabulary: no word in crypto is a reason to buy anything. If a term turns up that is not here, look it up before you act on it. Next: how cryptocurrency works and cryptocurrency explained simply.