Degen & memecoins

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Bored Ape Kennel Club

A dog for every ape: Yuga Labs let each Bored Ape holder claim a companion Kennel Club dog for the cost of gas in June 2021, with early royalties donated to animal charities. The first of the Yuga companion drops, and the proof that a collection could give things away and be paid handsomely in attention.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliveabbr.✎ 3

CC0

A licence that puts a work in the public domain, and the NFT movement — Nouns, Mfers, Goblintown, CrypToadz — that used it so anyone could copy, remix or sell the characters, on the theory that a picture everyone could use would be worth more than one only the owner could. 'CC0 summer', 2022, was the brief period in which this was the market's most fashionable argument.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Charlie Bit My Finger NFT

The 2007 clip of a baby biting his brother's finger, one of the most-watched videos in YouTube's history, sold by the family in May 2021 for $760,999 with the announcement that the original would be deleted from YouTube afterwards. It was not: the buyer, a Dubai music company, agreed the video could stay. The record's entry for the sale that threatened the internet with a loss and then withdrew the threat.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Clone X

Twenty thousand 3D avatars designed with Takashi Murakami, minted in late 2021 by the digital-sneaker studio RTFKT, which Nike bought within weeks. The most expensive fashion-house avatar of its year, and then a case study in corporate exit: Nike announced in December 2024 that it was winding RTFKT down, and in 2025 the artwork briefly vanished from view when a hosting arrangement lapsed.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Cool Cats

Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine blue cartoon cats drawn by Colin Egan, launched in July 2021 and briefly a top-five collection by trading volume. Mike Tyson used one as his profile picture; Time magazine took a licensing deal. The 'Cooltopia' game and a companion token followed, and the floor followed the wider market down.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Covid Alien

CryptoPunk #7523, the alien wearing a medical mask, sold at Sotheby's for $11.75 million in June 2021, reported at the time as the most expensive punk ever sold. The buyer was Shalom Meckenzie, a DraftKings shareholder. One of nine aliens, and the only one dressed for the year it was sold in.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Cozomo de' Medici

An anonymous Twitter account that spent the summer of 2021 buying CryptoPunks and crypto art and lecturing on collecting, and in September revealed itself to be Snoop Dogg. The persona kept going after the reveal, bought XCOPY's 'Right-click and Save As guy' for a reported 1,600 ETH, and in 2023 donated 22 works to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The record's entry for the pseudonym that was a rapper.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

CryptoZoo

A game promised by Logan Paul in 2021 in which buyers of 'egg' NFTs would hatch and breed animals to earn a token. The eggs sold; the game did not arrive. A YouTube investigation by Coffeezilla in December 2022 set out buyers' complaints; Paul first threatened to sue, then apologised, and in January 2024 offered to buy back eggs from holders who waived legal claims. A class action was filed by buyers.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2024

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Cryptoadz

Six thousand nine hundred and sixty-nine small pixel toads by the artist Gremplin, released under a CC0 licence in September 2021 at 0.069 ETH, and one of the collections whose price was mostly a measure of how much people liked the artist. The toads were free to copy, and were copied everywhere, which their maker said was the idea.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 2

Cuban's Mavericks Doge

The Dallas Mavericks began accepting Dogecoin for tickets and merchandise on 4 March 2021, processed through BitPay, under the team's then-owner Mark Cuban. Cuban said within days that the team had taken a reported 20,000 or so Dogecoin in sales and called it the best marketing available. It made the Mavericks the first major American sports team to take the coin, two months before its peak.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

CyberKongz

A thousand pixel gorillas released in March 2021 that became the first collection to pay its holders a daily token allowance, with 'baby' Kongz bred from two originals and a later 3D generation. The genesis Kongz traded for hundreds of ETH at the peak, largely on the strength of the daily payout. A pioneer of the model in which a picture is valued for its salary.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

DEX Screener

A chart site that indexes every pair on every decentralised exchange, with a trending column, paid boosts, and a purchasable token profile whose status the trenches check before anything else: is the dex paid. Founded in 2021 as a tool for traders, it was the front page of the memecoin market by 2024, the place a token had to appear before it could be said to exist. Its makers later built Moonshot.

▸ 2021peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

DeGods

Ten thousand gods in sunglasses, launched on Solana in October 2021 by Rohun Vora, known as Frank, and for a year the most valuable collection on that chain. Holders could burn a companion token to upgrade to skeletal 'DeadGods'. In March 2023 the collection bridged to Ethereum, the founder having decided the bigger chain was where the money was; later art seasons removed traits and drew complaints.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

DegenVC

A memecoin collective of thirty-odd degens that started in 2021 as a tight friendship around Secret Network and kept going, shipping projects mostly on Solana. Its known launches include Doge-flavoured and Krok tokens and the OKX Intern coin. Less a fund than a group chat with a deploy button, which is what VC means here.

▸ 2021peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Degenerate Ape Academy

Ten thousand cartoon apes that sold out on Solana in about eight minutes on 14 August 2021 and gave the chain its first proper mint frenzy: crashed sites, angry Discords and the phrase 'Solana summer'. Named with the word the era used for itself. The academy metaphor was decorative; nobody was taught anything except how fast a mint could go.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Disaster Girl NFT

Zoë Roth, the girl smirking in front of a burning house in a 2005 photograph, sold the original image as a token in April 2021 for 180 ETH, reported at around $500,000, and said she would use it to pay off student loans. The record's entry for the meme subject who, sixteen years on, finally got paid.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

● Aliven.✎ 3

Discord Compromise Mint

A fake mint announced from a project's own Discord after an attacker gains control of an admin account or a bot, posting a 'surprise' or 'stealth' drop with a link. The link drains the wallet of anyone who signs. In 2022 the pattern hit dozens of well-known servers, including Bored Ape Yacht Club's, and the phrase 'we will never do a surprise mint' became the standard disclaimer.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Discord NFT Backlash

Two days in November 2021 in which Discord's chief executive posted a screenshot suggesting an Ethereum wallet integration, the platform's gaming users cancelled paid subscriptions in protest, and the company said it had no current plans to ship it. The first clear sign that the audience the NFT industry most wanted — gamers — would rather not.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Doge Day

A campaign to push Dogecoin to one dollar on 20 April 2021, chosen for the date, with hashtags, countdowns and a plan that consisted entirely of buying. The coin reached around 40 cents in the days before and fell on the day itself. Filed as the first time the trenches scheduled a moon and the moon did not attend.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Doge NFT

The original photograph of Kabosu the Shiba Inu, sold as a token by her owner Atsuko Sato in June 2021 for 1,696 ETH — reported at around $4 million, then a record for a meme — to the collector group PleasrDAO, which later split ownership into billions of fractions so that anyone could own a piece of the dog. The record's entry for the most valuable photograph of a dog and the first meme to be fractionalised.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Dogecoin $0.73

Dogecoin's all-time high, reported at around $0.73 in the hours before Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live on 8 May 2021, on the theory that he would send it past a dollar on air. He called it 'a hustle' in a sketch instead, and the price fell by around a third during the broadcast. The record's clearest example of the news being priced in and then unpriced, in the same evening, on television.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

● Aliven.✎ 3

Dogecoin Foundation Relaunch

The August 2021 re-establishment of a foundation first set up in 2014 and dormant since, with an advisory board that included Ethereum's co-founder, Dogecoin's own co-creator, its core developer and the manager of Elon Musk's family office. The moment the joke coin acquired a governance body, a trail map and a manifesto, and the moment its holders discovered how little a foundation can do about a price.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Dogecoin SNL Crash

The night Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live, sat on Weekend Update as a 'financial expert' and, asked several times what Dogecoin was, answered 'yeah, it's a hustle'. The price fell by around a third during and after the broadcast, from roughly 70 cents to under 50, and did not return to that high. The record's entry for a top being called live on network television.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Dogefather

The title Elon Musk gave himself in a tweet announcing his Saturday Night Live date — 'The Dogefather. SNL May 8' — and the name the coin's holders used for him during the ten-day run-up. See Dogecoin SNL Crash for what the Dogefather said when he got there.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Dogelon Mars

A dog coin named by welding Doge to Elon and adding a planet, with lore about a Shiba Inu colonising Mars. Half the supply was sent to Vitalik Buterin's wallet, as was the fashion that spring; he passed it to the Methuselah Foundation, a longevity charity, which held it rather than selling. One of the 2021 Elon-adjacent coins that outlasted the attention.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Doodles

Ten thousand pastel characters drawn by Scott Martin, launched in October 2021 with a treasury the holders voted on, and the collection that tried hardest to become a media company. Pharrell Williams joined as chief brand officer in 2022; the company later said it was no longer 'an NFT project', put its characters on McDonald's cups and launched a token in 2025. The pivot that kept pivoting.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Everydays: The First 5000 Days

A collage of the 5,000 daily images Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, had made since May 2007, sold at Christie's on 11 March 2021 for $69,346,250 to the collector known as MetaKovan. The first purely digital, NFT-backed work sold by a major auction house, and the sale that took the word 'NFT' from a niche to every newspaper in a single afternoon.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Evolved Apes

Ten thousand fighting apes sold in September 2021 with the promise of a game and a tournament. A week after the sale the pseudonymous developer, 'Evil Ape', deleted the project's social accounts and website and transferred out 798 ETH, then worth around $2.7 million, including funds meant for a competition and for artists who had not been paid. The most widely reported rug of the profile-picture boom.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

● Aliven.✎ 3

Exit Liquidity

The people who buy so that earlier people can sell — you, usually, in retrospect. A term of art that became an insult and then a self-description: 'I was the exit liquidity'. The scene's word for the last one in.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

FEWOCiOUS

Victor Langlois, a teenage artist from Las Vegas painting loud, autobiographical figures about growing up trans, who became the youngest artist sold at Christie's when five works from 'Hello, i'm Victor' went for $2.16 million in June 2021, crashing the auction house's website. An earlier sneaker drop with RTFKT reportedly made $3.1 million in seven minutes. The artist the boom actually made.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Famous Fox Federation

Seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven cartoon foxes on Solana that outlasted their own hype by becoming infrastructure: the team's raffle and token tools were used by half the chain's other projects, so the foxes stayed relevant while the collections that used them did not. A PFP that turned into a utility company, which is rarer than it sounds.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingphr.✎ 2

Few Understand

'Few understand this' — the sign-off of a post that explained nothing, which implied a secret and delivered a chart. The 2021 phrase for being early, used mostly by people who were late.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Fidenza

Nine hundred and ninety-nine generative paintings by the Austin artist Tyler Hobbs, made of flowing rectangular strokes in a palette that could turn out muted or loud, minted at 0.17 ETH in June 2021 and sold out in minutes. Fidenza #313 sold for 1,000 ETH, reported at about $3.3 million, that August. The piece most often used to argue that the algorithm can be an artist's hand.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

First Tweet NFT

Jack Dorsey's first tweet, from March 2006, sold as a signed token in March 2021 for around $2.9 million to Sina Estavi, an Iranian-born crypto executive, with the proceeds given to charity. In April 2022 Estavi relisted it hoping for $48 million; the top bid reported at the deadline was about $280. The record's cleanest chart of the whole period, in two data points.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2022

● Alivev.✎ 3

Flip (NFT)

To buy at mint and sell as soon as the price rises, which in 2021 could be minutes. The verb of the trader who never intended to hold: 'minted and flipped' was a full trading strategy and often a full personality. 'Flipped' also described a collection whose floor had passed another's, and by 2022 'got flipped' meant the opposite — sold at a loss to someone who then flipped it up.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 2

Floki

A dog Elon Musk announced he would name Floki, which became a mascot before the dog was born and a bus advert in London before the dog could walk. The record's entry for a meme named after a pet that did not yet exist.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Floor Price

The cheapest currently listed item in a collection, and the number that became the whole conversation: not what your picture was worth but what the worst one was going for. Holders watched it the way sailors watch a barometer, and 'the floor' turned into a place — something you could sweep, defend, hold, or, in the phrase of 2022, watch fall through.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Foundation

An invite-only marketplace for single-edition art that launched in February 2021 and set the tone for the year's 'crypto art' moment: white space, an auction timer, and a rule that artists had to be invited by other artists. Nyan Cat sold on it that month for 300 ETH, around $590,000 at the time. Opened to everyone in 2022, by which point the auctions had gone quiet.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Fren

'Friend', spelled the way a frog would spell it, and the NFT market's word for anyone in the same collection. Frens were the people you told to hold, the people whose mint you shilled, and the people you sold to. The record notes that the word was warm and the transactions were not, and that the gap between the two was the community's defining feature.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Gas War

The NFT-era mint battle: a popular collection opens minting, thousands of wallets submit transactions at once, and the only way to be included in the next block is to pay a higher fee than everyone else. Fees of hundreds of dollars for a mint that cost tens were normal in 2021, failed transactions still cost the fee, and the phrase covers the whole ugly hour. Largely retired with the move to cheaper chains.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Grail

The one you would keep no matter what: the top-ranked, the rarest, the one with the trait everybody wanted. Borrowed from sneaker and watch collecting, where it means the same thing, and applied to pictures from 2021. A grail was the item you said you would never sell, and the record notes that the word was used most often by people explaining why they had just sold one.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Hashmasks

Sixteen thousand three hundred and eighty-four portraits by seventy artists, sold in January 2021 for a reported $16 million within days, before the profile-picture boom had a name. Each holder was given a daily allowance of a naming token, which could be spent to name the mask, and the names were the collectible. One of the first collections whose scarcity was in the words, not the pictures.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingphr.✎ 3

Have Fun Staying Poor

The reply to any sceptic during a boom — a dismissal that aged exactly as well as the boom did. Used sincerely in 2021, ironically from 2022, and now mainly by people quoting it back to those who said it.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Honeypot

A thing you can buy but cannot sell — the code lets you in and not out. The scene's word for a trap, borrowed from security research, and the reason 'can you sell?' is the first question anyone sensible asks.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Immutable

The Australian company behind Gods Unchained and the Ethereum layer-two built for NFT games, launched in 2021 so that trading cards did not cost more in fees than the cards. A gaming infrastructure name that outlived the games it was built for, partly by signing new ones: through 2023 and 2024 it announced studios faster than the studios shipped.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Impact Theory SEC Case

A Los Angeles media company sold 'Founder's Keys' tokens in late 2021, raising a reported $30 million, with marketing the SEC later said invited buyers to see the purchase as an investment in the company. In August 2023 the SEC brought its first enforcement action over NFTs; the company settled for about $6.1 million without admitting or denying the findings. The first time a regulator called an NFT a security.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

JPEG (NFT)

The NFT market's word for itself when it was being honest, and its critics' word for it when they were not being kind: 'you paid a million for a JPEG'. Adopted by holders as an ironic badge — 'JPEG summer', 'my JPEGs' — so that by 2022 both sides were using the same word and only the tone differed. The record notes that most of the images were PNGs.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Aliveabbr.✎ 3

LFG

'Let's go', with an expletive in the middle, and the reply to every announcement in every NFT Discord in 2021: a mint, a partnership, a floor bump, a tweet by someone famous. Distinct from the older gaming sense ('looking for group'), which the record files separately in spirit. By 2022 'LFG' under an announcement was less a cheer than a reflex, and by 2023 it was mostly ironic.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up