SLANGS USED BY CRYPTOCURRENCY TRADERS

As a trader in the crypto market, communication is very important with other traders, especially professionals. Professional traders most of the time communicate with themselves using slang that is specific to the crypto space. Most slang may be an actual English word with a meaning that has nothing to do with crypto but when used among traders it is content-specific.

If you are new to trading on Naijacrypto and you are interacting amongst traders, you will hear a lot of slang that you do not understand but we have got you covered as we have listed the most popular slang in crypto and what they mean in context.

1. HODL: HODL is the most famous typo used amongst crypto traders today and it simply means to hold on to your coins or any crypto no matter what the state of its market is. It is also defined as ‘HOLD’ but in the world of crypto traders, it is more fun to say “I am hodling BTC” than to say “I am Holding BTC”. Some traders may abbreviate it as Hold On for Dear Life, but whatever any trader calls it, the term means the same thing.

2. ATH: This is an abbreviation for ‘All-Time-High’. It refers to an event in a coin’s market where its price reaches a level that it has never gotten to in its entire existence history.

3. SAFU: SAFU actually means Secure Asset Funds for Users but originally was used to mean ‘safe’ in crypto. It first originated in July 2018 when Binance had site maintenance and the CEO tweeted “funds are safe” and a popular content creator in the crypto space later uploaded a youtube video with the title “Funds are safu”, replacing Safe with Safu.

4. KYC: This means ‘Know Your Customer’ or ‘Know Your Client’. It is a mandatory process to be carried out by crypto exchanges to be able to identify their customers, users and verify that they are who exactly they have claimed to be. It is a mandatory verification for most organizations offering financial services. On Naijacrypto, completion of KYC verification is compulsory to be able to run transactions on the exchange.

5. DYOR: This is a popular term used in the crypto space to mean ‘Do Your Own Research’. It simply implies that no matter what you have heard about from people concerning a coin, crypto, or market analysis, it is important that you conduct research by yourself to verify that the information in circulation is in fact true. It saves a lot of traders and newbies from taking wrong market actions.

6. FUD: This is the term that stands for ‘Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubts’. It can be called a strategy used to bring about fear, uncertainty, and doubts about a particular coin or cryptocurrency in the market, causing traders to let go of it and cause a price drop in the market. Often times the traders that do this have a large market influence and do it for tier advantage they are referred to as FUDsters. Would you say this is a good strategy?

7. SATS: Sats is a short form for Satoshis and it is used to describe the smallest unit of bitcoin. 0.00000001

8. WHALE: This is a term used to describe traders in the cryptocurrency market that hold up to ten percent or more of any cryptocurrency. With this, whales have the potential and power to manipulate currency fluctuations in the market.

9. PUMP AND DUMP: Pump and Dump is a situation in the crypto market that is created intentionally by some traders usually the whales. The pump is when the traders make an agreement to increase the price of a coin by creating the demand (with news and stories about the coin) for it after which they have bought it, the dump on the other hand is when the traders sell off the coin after the price has been artificially pumped in value. It is mostly considered a scam by other players in the market.

10. BAGHOLDERS: This is used to refer to traders or buyers of any crypto /coin and is stock with the asset because it happened to reduce and decrease in value which is not the situation that they had anticipated when they bought the crypto.

11. MOONING: Mooning is used to describe a situation in the market where the price of any crypto asset rises very rapidly in a matter of a few days. The most common coin that has been experiencing the “mooning” is the popular DOGECOIN.

12. FOMO: ‘Fear Of Missing Out’, This is a term that is not exclusive to crypto traders but is used to describe situations where traders buy a cryptocurrency or more as a result of its popularity amongst other traders. Basically, the other traders buy into the asset because they do not want to miss out on what’s trending amongst other traders.

13. SHILL: This is an event where someone promotes a particular coin for their own benefit because they feel it is not doing well enough. In promoting the coin, they expect it to rise in demand and value. It is usually done by whales and huge investors in the coin’s project.

14. REKT: This means the same thing as ‘wrecked’. When you are rekt in the crypto market you are supposedly suffering losses from holding a coin that has dropped in value.

15. FLIPPENING: This refers to events where other cryptocurrencies grow bigger, more important, and popular than bitcoin. Bitcoin is the most valued today over all the existing cryptocurrencies.

16. NO COINER: This is used to refer to people who have no bitcoin or mostly have no interest in it.

17. VAPORWAVE: This refers to a cryptocurrency or coin project that exists purely based on hype but never gets to exist. The project is usually super hyped before it is even released and in the end, it never does.

18. CRYPTOSIS: This is an actual disease that exists and is studied in human biology but in crypto, it means the desire to want to consume all the information there is about cryptocurrency. If you have just heard about crypto today and you find yourself doing a lot of research and buying crypto, you definitely have cryptosis.

You never have to be lost and confused again in a room full of traders because you have just become a pro in speaking ‘crypto slang’.

written by Joy Abia.