Degen & memecoins

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Claynosaurz

Claymation-style dinosaurs on Solana, launched in November 2022 by an animation team that had worked in film and games, with a stated ambition of building a studio franchise rather than a trading chart. The dinosaurs were genuinely well made, which set them apart, and the collection survived the Solana winter better than most of its neighbours.

▸ 2022peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Coinbase NFT

The exchange's NFT marketplace, announced in October 2021 with a waitlist reported at over a million people, launched in beta in April 2022 to very little trade, and quietly left to wind down after the company paused creator drops in February 2023. Reported first-day volume was under $100,000. The waitlist had been the peak; the product arrived after it.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2023

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Eminem–Snoop Ape Video

A music video in which Eminem and Snoop Dogg turn into their own Bored Apes and roam the Otherside, released in June 2022 and performed at the MTV Video Music Awards that August with the animated apes on stage behind the rappers. The record's entry for the most expensive advertisement a cartoon collection ever got for nothing.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2022

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Free Mint

A launch where the pictures cost nothing but the transaction fee, popularised in May 2022 by a collection of ugly goblins with no roadmap and no Discord that briefly outsold the blue chips. For a few months in 2022 'free mint' was the only format that worked, because it was the only one nobody could lose money on until they tried to sell.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Frosties

Eight thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight ice-cream cartoon characters sold in January 2022 for about $1.1 million, after which the website and Discord went dark within hours and the funds were moved out. In March 2022 the US Department of Justice charged two twenty-year-olds, Ethan Nguyen and Andre Llacuna, with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, the first federal NFT rug-pull charges.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2022

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

GameStop NFT Marketplace

The retailer's own NFT marketplace, launched in July 2022 at the request of a shareholder base that wanted the meme stock to become a crypto company, and closed in February 2024 with a notice citing regulatory uncertainty. It processed a reported few million dollars in its first days and very little after. The record's example of a business built for an audience rather than a market.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Goblintown

A collection of deliberately ugly goblins, launched for free in the middle of a crash with the promise of nothing, whose creators spoke only in goblin noises on a live audio space. The bear market's court jester, and the record's example of nihilism selling.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2022

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Instagram NFTs

Meta's test of letting users display NFTs from connected wallets on Instagram, announced in May 2022, expanded to a hundred countries by August 2022, and switched off in March 2023 with a short post saying the company was 'winding down' digital collectibles to focus on other things. The feature outlived the boom by about nine months, which was the problem.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2023

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Invisible Friends

Five thousand animated figures with no body — walking clothes, hats and shoes around an empty centre — by the Swedish animator Markus Magnusson, released in February 2022 with a floor that briefly went past 10 ETH. One of the last collections to sell out on hype alone before the market turned, and among the better-drawn ones.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

LooksRare

A marketplace that opened in January 2022 by airdropping a token to anyone who had traded on OpenSea, on condition that they listed something — the 'vampire attack', in the phrase the industry borrowed from a 2020 exchange war. Its volume figures were briefly the largest in the world and were, on inspection, mostly people trading with themselves to earn the token.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Moonbirds

Ten thousand pixel owls launched by Kevin Rose's PROOF Collective at 2.5 ETH each, with a 'nesting' feature that rewarded holders for not selling. Reported sales passed $280 million within days. In August 2022 PROOF made the art CC0, to the fury of holders who thought they had bought exclusivity; Yuga Labs bought the collection in 2024 and reportedly sold it on to Orange Cap Games in 2025.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Musk Dogecoin Manipulation Lawsuit

A proposed class action filed in June 2022 by a Dogecoin holder accusing Elon Musk and Tesla of running a pyramid scheme through tweets, seeking reported damages of 258 billion dollars. In August 2024 the judge dismissed it, calling the posts aspirational and puffery that no reasonable investor could rely on. The legal system's most formal statement that a tweet about a dog is not advice.

▸ 2022peak 2024†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

NFT Insider Trading Case

The first criminal case described by prosecutors as insider trading in NFTs: a former OpenSea product manager was charged in June 2022 with buying pictures shortly before featuring them on the site's front page, convicted of wire fraud and money laundering in May 2023, and sentenced to three months. In July 2025 an appeals court reportedly vacated the conviction. The record states the sequence and nothing more.

▸ 2022peak 2023†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

NFT Royalties War

The eighteen months in which NFT marketplaces stopped enforcing the royalty that creators had been promised on every resale. X2Y2 made it optional in August 2022, Blur made not paying the default, OpenSea tried a blocklist tool in November 2022 and then gave up, announcing optional fees in August 2023 and extending them to everything by February 2024. The creators lost.

▸ 2022peak 2023†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

NFT Winter

The period from roughly May 2022 to the end of 2023 in which NFT trading volume fell by more than ninety per cent from its January 2022 peak, floor prices of the big collections fell with it, and the phrase 'crypto winter' was borrowed for pictures. The record dates its end to the spring of 2024, when volumes rose for a season and people stopped saying it. They did not start saying 'summer'.

▸ 2022peak 2023†2024

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Nike .Swoosh

Nike's own platform for virtual trainers, launched in November 2022 a year after it bought the studio RTFKT, selling its first digital 'Our Force 1' boxes in 2023 for around $20 each. Built to avoid the word NFT and the usual marketplaces. Nike said in December 2024 it would wind RTFKT down; .Swoosh continued as a name attached to smaller drops.

▸ 2022peak 2023still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Okay Bears

Ten thousand cartoon bears on Solana, minted in April 2022 for 1.5 SOL each, that briefly topped OpenSea's volume charts within days of launch and gave the chain its first collection that Ethereum people had heard of. The name was the whole attitude: not great, not bad, okay. It arrived a fortnight before the market it was supposed to join fell over.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

OpenSea Stolen Item Policy

The marketplace's rule for freezing items reported as stolen: from August 2022, a report had to be backed by a police report within seven days or the freeze would be lifted. Introduced after a year of complaints from both sides — victims who wanted items frozen, buyers who found themselves holding a picture they could not sell — and the record's example of a marketplace being asked to be a court.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Otherdeed

Fifty-five thousand plots of virtual land for Yuga's Otherside game, sold at 305 ApeCoin each in a single evening and reported to have raised around $320 million. Demand pushed Ethereum fees so high that over $150 million in gas was reportedly burned, much of it on failed transactions. Yuga apologised for 'turning off the lights on Ethereum' and the game arrived in pieces.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Pixelmon

A 'Pokémon-style' game that sold 10,000 creature tokens at around 3 ETH each in February 2022, raising a reported $70 million, and then revealed models so crude that one — a lumpy grey creature named Kevin — became a meme and, briefly, the most valuable thing in the collection. The project was taken over and rebuilt; Kevin got a licensed plush. The record's entry for the reveal that ate the game.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Redacted Remilio Babies

Ten thousand small, wide-eyed anime children with censor bars and street clothes, released by Remilia Collective in September 2022 as a sibling to its Milady set, and traded through 2023 alongside it as the market's edgiest corner found buyers. Shares Milady's aesthetic, its online culture and its controversies, which the record has on file under the older collection and does not repeat here.

▸ 2022peak 2023still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Reddit Collectible Avatars

Profile-picture NFTs sold by Reddit from July 2022 without using the word 'NFT', minted on Polygon into a built-in wallet called the Vault, and adopted by millions of users who had never bought crypto. For a few months in late 2022 Reddit had more NFT wallets than OpenSea had users. The programme wound down through 2024 and the avatars became what they always looked like: avatars.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Ronin Bridge Hack

The theft of around $600 million in crypto from the bridge connecting Axie Infinity's Ronin chain to Ethereum in March 2022, one of the largest reported in the industry. The exploit used compromised validator keys and went unnoticed for six days. The US Treasury later attributed it to a North Korean state group. Sky Mavis reimbursed users after raising new funding.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2022

● Aliven.✎ 3

Seaport

The open-source trading protocol OpenSea released in May 2022 to replace its old contract, designed to let anyone build a marketplace on the same rails and to cut gas costs. It became the plumbing under a good deal of the NFT market, including some of OpenSea's rivals. The record notes it as the rare 2022 NFT launch that was purely technical and did exactly what it said.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Seth Green's Stolen Ape

In May 2022 the actor Seth Green lost Bored Ape #8398, which he had planned to feature as a character named Fred Simian in a show called White Horse Tavern, to a phishing scam. The ape was sold on to a buyer known as DarkWing84, raising the question of whether Green still held the licence to use it. Green reportedly paid around 165 ETH to get it back in June 2022. The case that put NFT licensing in a legal column.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2022

● Aliven.✎ 3

Soft Rug

A rug pull done slowly: the creators do not steal, they just stop — the account goes quiet, the roadmap fades, the chat empties. The scene's word for abandonment, as opposed to theft, and the more common of the two.

▸ 2022peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Square Enix NFT Push

The Japanese publisher's stated ambition, in a New Year letter from its president in January 2022, to pursue blockchain games and 'play to contribute', followed by the sale of its Western studios in May 2022 and a token-and-NFT story game called Symbiogenesis in 2023. The letter was read as a declaration; the studios sale was read as the bill. The company later softened its language.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Starbucks Odyssey

Starbucks's loyalty scheme built on NFTs, announced in September 2022 and run in beta from December 2022, in which customers completed 'journeys' — quizzes, coffee purchases — to earn collectible 'stamps' on Polygon. Some stamps resold for hundreds of dollars in early 2023. The programme closed in March 2024 with a note that it had been 'a beta'.

▸ 2022peak 2023†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Tensor

A Solana marketplace built for traders rather than collectors — sweeping, bidding and charts first, pictures second — that took much of Magic Eden's volume in 2023 and rewarded its users with a token in April 2024. Solana's Blur, in the phrase the chain used, and the issuer of the Tensorians collection. The record notes the trader interface as the moment the chain stopped pretending.

▸ 2022peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Tesla Doge Merch

The day Tesla's online shop began taking Dogecoin for a small range of merchandise, as promised by its chief executive a month earlier: a whistle shaped like the Cybertruck at 300 Dogecoin, a belt buckle, a children's quad bike. Not the cars. The trenches treated it as adoption; the record treats it as a whistle priced in a dog.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Tiffany CryptoPunk Pendants

Tiffany's offer, in August 2022, to make a physical gold-and-gemstone pendant of your CryptoPunk for 30 ETH — around $50,000 at the time — limited to 250 buyers who had to already own a Punk. Sold out in about twenty minutes, reportedly raising around $12.5 million. A jeweller charging Punk owners to turn a pixel picture into an object, in the middle of the crash.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2022

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Tonight Show Apes

The segment in which Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton showed each other their Bored Apes on network television, held up as printouts, to a studio audience that applauded on instruction. Hilton's had a trucker hat; Fallon's had a striped shirt and a captain's hat. Widely clipped, widely mocked, and filed by the record as the moment the profile-picture trade met the general public and the general public winced.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2022

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Trump Digital Trading Cards

Forty-five thousand cartoon cards of Donald Trump as a superhero, astronaut, cowboy and sheriff, sold at $99 each in December 2022 after a 'major announcement' teaser, and sold out within a day for a reported $4.45 million. Further series followed in 2023, including a 'mugshot edition'. Mocked across the spectrum and, by the numbers, one of the most successful drops of the crash years.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Twitter NFT Profile Picture

Twitter's feature, launched in January 2022 for paying subscribers, that let a verified NFT be used as a profile picture inside a hexagon instead of a circle. The hexagon instantly became a marker: to holders it meant you had proof, to everyone else it meant you could be muted on sight. 'Hexagon' entered the language as a noun for a kind of person.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

X Payments Doge Hopes

The rumour, revived every few months since 2022, that Twitter, renamed X, is about to accept Dogecoin for payments. Its high point was April 2023, when the site's bird logo was replaced by the Shiba Inu for several days and the coin's price reportedly rose by around a third before the logo went back. Licences, job listings and cryptic replies have each set it off again since. No such feature had launched by mid-2026.

▸ 2022peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

X2Y2

The second marketplace to launch by airdropping tokens to OpenSea users, in February 2022, and the first major one to make creator royalties optional, in August 2022 — the move that started the royalties war. It closed in April 2025 with a short note. The record's example of a platform whose most consequential act was a settings change.

▸ 2022peak 2022†2025

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

y00ts

Fifteen thousand cartoon characters minted on Solana in September 2022 by the DeGods team, allocated by 'scholarship' application rather than a public sale. In 2023 Polygon reportedly paid around $3 million to bring the collection to its chain; in 2024 the team announced a move to Ethereum instead and said it would return the grant. A collection that changed chains twice in eighteen months.

▸ 2022peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

100x

The promised multiple. A hundred-times return is the standard unit of memecoin hope, quoted before a coin launches and never after, and its escalated form, 1000x, is used by callers who know a hundred is no longer exciting. The number describes what the caller wants to happen, not what has happened, and everyone using the term knows this.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Adidas Into the Metaverse

Adidas's first NFT drop: thirty thousand tokens sold in December 2021 for 0.2 ETH each, reportedly raising around $22 million in a day, each redeemable for physical clothing including a tracksuit and a hoodie. The mint was slowed by a bot that bought hundreds at once; the tracksuit was shipped in 2022 to people who mostly kept it in the bag.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Allowlist

The list of wallet addresses permitted to mint before the public, earned by being early in a Discord, posting fan art, inviting friends, or simply being known. Called 'whitelist' until an industry-wide renaming in late 2021. Getting on it was the real economy of 2021 — 'WL' spots were traded, begged for and, in a few reported cases, sold — and the public mint was what was left.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Alpha

Inside information, or anything presented as it. In finance alpha is the excess return a skilled manager earns; in the trenches it is a rumour with a contract address, and 'sharing alpha' means posting a coin before it moves. The word made every tip sound like analysis. Most alpha, on inspection, was someone's bag.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Alpha Group

A paid Discord or Telegram promising members early information on coins and mints before the public gets it. Membership sold by the month, sometimes by the NFT, and the product was a feeling of being on the inside. Some groups had real researchers. Many were a caller with a subscription button. A private members' club in which the club also owns the bar.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Alivev.✎ 3

Ape In

To buy without thinking — like an ape, or like a person who has decided that thinking is what lost them the last one. The verb of the trenches, and the record's entry for a whole decision-making style.

▸ 2021peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Aurory

A Solana game project that sold ten thousand character pictures in September 2021 on the strength of concept art and a promised RPG, and then spent the following years actually building the game while the pictures lost most of their value. One of the few 2021 'the game is coming' collections where the game did in fact come, to a smaller audience than the mint had.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Baby Doge

A coin launched in June 2021 as the child of Dogecoin, with a cartoon puppy and a supply in the quadrillions, which rose sharply after Elon Musk tweeted 'Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo' to the tune of Baby Shark. A joke about a joke about a dog was moved by a joke about a song, and the trenches considered this normal.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Bad Luck Brian NFT

Kyle Craven, whose 2006 school photograph became Bad Luck Brian, sold the image as a token in March 2021 for 20 ETH, reported at around $36,000 — a modest sum among the year's meme sales, and, given the meme, about right. He kept the braces and the sweater vest.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

● Aliven.✎ 3

Blue Chip (NFT)

A collection assumed to hold its value because of its age, its holders or its name: Punks, Apes, and then whichever three or four others the room agreed on that month. The record notes that the term was applied by people to the collections they held, and that the 2022 crash halved the list. It was the industry's word for 'we think this one is different'.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 2

Bored Ape

Ten thousand cartoon apes with bored expressions, bought as profile pictures by celebrities in 2021 and worn as a badge of a club whose main activity was owning the badge. The record's entry for the moment an avatar became a status symbol, and the moment it stopped.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up