Degen & memecoins

◐ Dyingn.✎ 2

Zerebro

An AI agent on Solana that posted, made music and had a token, launched in November 2024. In May 2025 its co-founder appeared to shoot himself on a livestream, and a 'legacy' coin tied to the event rose in the hours after; he was then reported alive at a family home, and the press described the stunt as staged. The record files it as the point at which the AI-agent coin cycle ran out of things to fake.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

ai16z

An 'AI venture fund' on Solana whose fund manager was a language-model impersonation of Marc Andreessen, launched in October 2024 by the developer of the Eliza agent framework as a parody of the firm it rhymed with. The token rose to a reported market value above two billion dollars in January 2025 and was later rebranded under the framework's name. The trenches' first AI fund manager was a bot doing a bit.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Airdrop Farming

Doing small tasks on a new platform in the hope of being given something later — the internet's version of collecting stamps for a free coffee, at scale, with spreadsheets. The 2023–24 hobby of people who described it as work.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

ApeFest Eye Injuries

After Yuga Labs' ApeFest gathering in Hong Kong in November 2023, dozens of attendees reported eye pain, burning and vision problems consistent with photokeratitis, the condition caused by ultraviolet exposure. Yuga said it was investigating and that a small proportion of attendees were affected; reporting pointed at UV lighting on the stage. An NFT event with a medical column.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 4

Bitcoin Ordinals

A numbering scheme for individual satoshis, published by the developer Casey Rodarmor in January 2023, which allowed images, text and other files to be 'inscribed' onto the Bitcoin chain and treated as collectibles. Within weeks it had produced NodeMonkes, Bitcoin Punks and a four-megabyte wizard, raised fees, and started an argument about what Bitcoin was for. NFTs on the chain that had said it did not want them.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Bitcoin Punks

The ten thousand CryptoPunks images inscribed onto Bitcoin in February 2023, in the earliest days of Ordinals, claimed by whoever inscribed each one first, all with inscription numbers below a million. Not the punks, not licensed, and not pretending to be; the value was in being the first copy of the first collection on the oldest chain. The record files it as the Bitcoin chain's founding act of homage and theft.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Call Channel

A Telegram channel whose entire output is coins: a name, a contract address, sometimes a reason, and a chart posted later if the call went well and never if it did not. The channel's owner is a caller; the followers are the volume; and the coins are frequently paid to be posted. 'Called by' a large channel became a line in launch announcements, which tells you what the calls were worth to the people being called.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Checks

Eighty blue check marks in a grid, sold as an $8 open edition in January 2023 by the designer Jack Butcher with the caption 'This artwork may or may not be notable', a joke on Twitter's paid verification. Just over 16,000 were minted in 24 hours; holders could later 'burn' checks together to reduce the count and change the colours. The first hit of the post-crash year, made of the verification badge.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Fair Launch

A launch with no pre-sale, no insiders and no allocation — everyone starts at zero — as a claim, made by every mascot in 2024, and true of a few. The scene's word for 'trust me', and the record's word for 'check'.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Grok Tokens

A wave of unofficial tokens named after xAI's chatbot, launched within hours of its announcement in November 2023 and before the product shipped. The largest, on Ethereum, reached a reported market value above $100m within days, then fell by a reported 70 per cent after an investigator noted its promotional X account had been reused from an abandoned project. Smaller copies were reported drained by their deployers.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu

A name assembled from four unrelated things and a suffix, as a parody of every mascot name of the era, which then became exactly what it parodied. The record's entry for a joke that got taken at its word.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2024

● Aliveabbr.✎ 3

KOL

'Key opinion leader' — the marketing term for influencer, adopted by the mascot scene as the word for the accounts that get paid to post a chart. Said with suspicion, usually by people who wish they were one.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Alivephr.✎ 3

LP Burned

The claim that a coin's liquidity pool tokens have been destroyed or locked, so that the developer cannot pull the pool and leave holders with nothing to sell into. In the trenches it is a trust signal, printed in launch announcements next to the contract address, and a phrase that means 'this cannot be rugged in the classic way'. Other ways remained available.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Alivev.✎ 2

Larp

To pretend to be something one is not, in the trenches specifically to claim to be a developer, an insider or an early holder without evidence. The word came from forums, where it described people posing as authorities, and fitted memecoin culture at once: a pseudonymous account claiming to know a coin's team is 'larping' until a wallet or a screenshot says otherwise. Also the noun for the claim.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Mad Lads

Ten thousand illustrated characters minted through the Backpack wallet in April 2023, sold as 'xNFTs' that could run small programs inside the wallet, and the collection that became Solana's flagship for the following year. The mint was delayed after bots hit the site; the team's response — a decoy mint that let the bots pay into nothing — became the story.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Alivephr.✎ 3

Mint Authority Revoked

The Solana trust checkbox: confirmation that whoever created a token has given up the ability to make more of it. On Solana a token's creator holds a 'mint authority' by default, which means they could print supply at will; revoking it is a one-off transaction and its absence is a red flag every screening tool displays. A phrase that started as a technical detail and became a ritual line in launch announcements.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Mog Coin

A cat in sunglasses, launched on Ethereum in July 2023 and named after mogging, the looksmaxxing term for out-attracting someone by standing next to them. It sat out the rest of 2023, then rose through 2024 to a reported market value near a billion dollars while newer cats came and went. The rare meme coin that got funnier with age.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingphr.✎ 3

NFTs Are Dead

The headline of the autumn of 2023, sourced to a report from a gambling-affiliate site that found around 95 per cent of 73,000 collections it examined had a market value of zero. Rolling Stone ran it as 'your NFTs are actually — finally — totally worthless'. The methodology was criticised; the sentence was not, because everyone had already felt it.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

NodeMonkes

Ten thousand pixel monkeys inscribed on Bitcoin in the first weeks of Ordinals, February 2023, and then sat on for most of the year before being released in December. Reported in March 2024 to have briefly overtaken Bored Apes on floor price, which was the headline the Bitcoin side had been waiting for. The record's entry for the first ten-thousand set on the chain that had not wanted one.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Opepen

Sixteen thousand free tokens released by Jack Butcher in January 2023 as a blank canvas — a simple face made of circles, derived from Pepe — with the art revealed over time in 'sets' submitted by invited artists and voted on by holders. The record's entry for the collection whose art was a schedule, and the last profile picture to catch on before the trade went quiet.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Ordinal Punks

One hundred punk-style pixel faces inscribed in the first days of Ordinals, February 2023, traded by hand — in Discord messages, on a Google spreadsheet and through escrow with volunteers — because no marketplace yet existed. A reported sale of one for a large sum was disputed within days when the buyer's identity could not be confirmed. The record's entry for a market that ran on a spreadsheet.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Pepe Multisig Incident

In August 2023 the wallet holding Pepe's team reserves changed its signing rule from five of eight to two of eight and sent around 16 trillion PEPE, reported at about $15 million, to exchanges. The price fell by roughly a fifth before the official account said three former team members had done it and were gone. The record's entry for the phrase 'rogue team members'.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

Pepe Renaissance

The spring of 2023 in which Pepe the Frog, after years as a contaminated symbol, was reclaimed as a mascot by a crowd who found the frog funny again. Filed for the return: the frog came back green, sad and ubiquitous, and stayed.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Porsche NFT

Porsche's first NFT drop, January 2023: 7,500 pictures of a white 911 at 0.911 ETH each, around $1,500 at the time. The mint stalled with most of the supply unsold, the resale price fell below the mint price within hours, and the company cut the supply the next day. The record's example of a carmaker discovering that a price is not a brand.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 4

Pudgy Toys

Plush penguins on a Walmart shelf, each with a code that unlocked a character in an online game called Pudgy World, launched in around two thousand stores in September 2023 and expanded to more in May 2024. The first NFT brand to reach a supermarket aisle without the word 'NFT' on the box. Reported sales passed a million units within the first year.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Rugcheck

A screening site for Solana tokens that reports the things a buyer is supposed to check before buying — mint and freeze authority, liquidity status, top holders, a risk score — and the verb it produced: to 'rugcheck' a coin is to run its address through the site or one like it. A green score became a marketing asset. It describes what a contract can do, not what its owner will.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

SEC v. SafeMoon

The civil and criminal cases over SafeMoon, a 2021 token sold on the promise that its liquidity was locked. On 1 November 2023 the SEC charged the company, its creator and two executives with fraud; the same day a federal indictment was unsealed and the chief executive and chief technology officer were arrested. The former chief executive was convicted at trial in May 2025; the creator was reported still at large.

▸ 2023peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 4

SPX6900

A memecoin whose entire pitch is to beat the S&P 500 by 6,400 points, illustrated by a fish-eyed cartoon face and the instruction to stop trading and believe in something. Launched in August 2023 and near dead by 2024, before the analyst Murad Mahmudov named it his favourite in a September 2024 conference talk on 'cult coins'. It then rose by reported multiples in the hundreds, and its holders behaved as forecast.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Shibarium

Shiba Inu's own layer-two network, promised for about two years and launched in August 2023 into a bridge that stalled on day one, with a reported $1.7 million of ether stuck in transit for a few days before the chain resumed. The coin did not become the second Ethereum. It did get its own chain, which is more than most dogs manage.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Sybil

One person running many wallets to collect an airdrop many times over, and the word projects use for that person when they cut them out. A sybil attack is an old network-security term; the trenches shortened it to a noun and a verb, and projects hired or crowdsourced 'sybil hunters' to trace wallet clusters and strike them off before tokens went out. Both sides call it farming. One side calls it cheating.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Taproot Wizards

A crude wizard drawing from a 2013 Bitcoin forum meme, inscribed in February 2023 as a nearly four-megabyte image filling an entire block, mined by Luxor, and turned into a collection and a company by Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, who raised a reported $7.5 million and later more to 'make Bitcoin magical again'. The most argued-about object of the Ordinals season and, for a time, the largest transaction on the chain.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Tensorians

The pixel-faced collection issued by the Solana marketplace Tensor in mid-2023, sold to the platform's own traders and later attached to its token airdrop in April 2024. A marketplace's mascot as a tradeable asset: the buyers were the users, and the users were told the picture would count for something later. It did, once.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Toshi

A blue cartoon cat named after Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong's own cat, itself named after Satoshi, launched by strangers on Base within days of the network opening in August 2023. Coinbase did not issue it and said so. The cat became Base's unofficial mascot regardless, survived the network's slow first year, and later gained a listing on Coinbase's exchange, which the trenches took as a wink.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Trading Bots

The tools that replaced wallets in the trenches: Telegram bots such as BonkBot and Trojan that buy a token from a pasted address in a single message, and web terminals such as Photon that do the same with a chart attached, for fees of around one per cent and with the private key held by the service. They made the trade faster than the thought behind it. Trojan began as Unibot's Solana arm and was renamed in 2024.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Turbo Toad

A toad designed by a chatbot, on a $69 budget, as an experiment in whether an AI could run a meme from scratch. It could. The first mascot with a machine for a parent, and an early sign of where 2024 was going.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Twitter Doge Logo

For a few days in April 2023 the bird on Twitter's home page was the Doge Shiba Inu, with no announcement, and Dogecoin rose by around 30 percent on the sight of it. A year earlier Musk had posted a message from a user telling him to buy Twitter and 'change the bird logo to a doge'. He bought Twitter. He changed the logo. Then he changed it back.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Alivephr.✎ 3

Wen Token

The airdrop beg. Posted under every announcement by a project that has not yet issued a token, and under many that never will: 'wen token' asks when the free coins are coming, and its tone is somewhere between a joke and a demand. The phrase became so standard that projects began replying to it before it was asked. It is the trenches' version of a customer asking when the shop opens.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Wojak (coin)

A token bearing the bald grey face of internet sadness, launched on Ethereum in April 2023 in the same fortnight as Pepe and traded on the theory that every meme character deserved a market. It rose with the frog and fell faster. Its mascot had spent a decade losing money in cartoons; the coin let holders do it in person.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

dogwifhat

A Shiba Inu in a pink knitted beanie, photographed years earlier, and the joke that the hat was the entire value proposition: 'literally just a dog wif a hat'. In March 2024 a crowd paid to put him on the Las Vegas Sphere. The hat sold at auction. The dog is real and does not care.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

999 Club

The thousand three-digit ENS names, from 000.eth to 999.eth, which in the spring of 2022 became a collectible club with a floor price and a Twitter list, followed by the 10k Club for four digits. Owners set the number as their display name; the names were trading for the price of a car for a few months and settled lower. The record's entry for the moment a domain name became a profile picture.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

ApeCoin

The token attached to the Bored Ape ecosystem, airdropped to ape holders in March 2022 — around 10,094 per Bored Ape — and immediately worth six figures per wallet at the opening price. It governed a DAO, paid for Otherdeed land, and later got its own chain. The record's rule is no coin names; this one is an exception because it is a collection's shadow, not a coin in its own right.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Azuki

Ten thousand anime-styled characters that sold out in minutes in January 2022 and for a season the most traded collection on Ethereum. In May 2022 the founder known as Zagabond blogged about three earlier projects he had built and abandoned, and the floor fell by around half in a day. The June 2023 Elementals mint raised a reported $38 million in fifteen minutes and was criticised for looking like the original set.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Bieber Ape

Justin Bieber paid 500 ETH, reported at around $1.3 million, for Bored Ape #3001 in January 2022 — a plain ape with no rare traits, at roughly ten times the collection's floor at the time. Reports in 2023 valued the same ape at under $60,000. The record's clearest example of a celebrity paying the price of the celebrity, not the picture.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2023

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Blur

A marketplace for professional NFT traders, launched in October 2022 with no fees, optional royalties and a points system that paid users in a future token for listing and bidding. The February 2023 airdrop turned it into the largest marketplace by volume; the volume was largely people farming the next airdrop. The record's marker for the end of the collector era and the start of the trader one.

▸ 2022peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Bonk

A Shiba Inu with a baseball bat — the 'bonk' of the old doge-hitting-doge meme — airdropped to a demoralised Solana community on Christmas Day 2022 as a joke, and the joke that restarted the chain's social life. The mascot that outlived the moment it was made for.

▸ 2022peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Bored Ape Instagram Hack

On 25 April 2022 the official Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram account was taken over and used to post a link to a fake 'airdrop'. Holders who connected their wallets had their apes and mutants transferred out; Yuga Labs said four Bored Apes, six Mutant Apes and three Kennel Club dogs were taken, with a reported value of around $2.8 million. Yuga said two-factor authentication had been enabled on the account.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2022

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Bumblebee Azuki

The Azuki that Logan Paul reportedly bought for 500 ETH, around $623,000, in June 2022, in a video in which he described it as a collector's decision. In January 2023 he posted that it was now worth far less. The record's example of a celebrity purchase used, by the buyer himself, as the punchline to the collapse.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Cets on Creck

Cats drawn to look like they were on something, launched on Solana in January 2022 by a pseudonymous team that leaned entirely into the name, and one of the last Solana collections to sell out before the spring crash. The mint was chaotic, the humour was deliberate, and the collection is remembered mostly as the punchline it set out to be.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up