DICTIONARY/TOPICS/Degen & memecoins

Degen & memecoins

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🏷 Topic challenge · Degen & memecoins edition

Have you seen it? Degen & memecoins only.

This is not the main game. Only Degen & memecoins records come up, and the desk hands out its own titles and badges, from Paper Hands to Deployed The Contract. Your main-game file is left alone.

Start the Degen & memecoins challenge ▶Records open on their real pages. Answer on each one.

Badges on offer5Five · gm10Ten · wagmi, allegedly25Twenty-five · few understand

All Alive Dying Dead Undead Fossil

A–Z Newest Oldest Shortest life Longest life Most entries

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Ten thousand two hundred and fifty-five hand-drawn animals with a personality trait each — 'Empathetic Elephant', 'Patient Panda' — by the marketing entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, each token a ticket to his VeeCon conference. Launched in May 2021 and reported to have made tens of millions of dollars on the primary sale. The collection that was, openly, a motivational speaker's mailing list.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Vitalik's Dog Coin Dumps

The recurring event in which memecoin projects send a large share of supply to Ethereum's co-founder's public wallet as a stunt, and he sells, gives away or burns it. The founding instance was Shiba Inu in May 2021: around half the supply was sent to him unasked; he donated tokens reported as worth around a billion dollars to a Covid relief fund in India and burned most of the rest. Later dog coins fared no better.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingabbr.✎ 3

'We're all gonna make it' — a bodybuilding-forum motto from a decade earlier, borrowed by the 2021 boom as a group cheer and abbreviated to four letters. Its twin, NGMI, was for the people who were not. Both are now said with a smile that is not quite a smile.

▸ 2021peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

A script, embedded in a fake mint page or a hijacked official account, that asks a visitor to sign a transaction and uses the signature to move everything out of their wallet. Sold as a kit by several groups from 2021. The reference case is April 2022, when Bored Ape Yacht Club's Instagram account was compromised and a link posted from it drained NFTs reported at around $2.8 million.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

A drop of ten works by the musician Grimes — flying cherubs with weapons over ruined landscapes, under the name WarNymph — that sold a reported $5.8 million in about twenty minutes on Nifty Gateway in February 2021, days before the Beeple sale. The first celebrity NFT sale most people read about, and the one that fixed the word 'drop' in the general vocabulary.

▸ 2021peak 2021†2021

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Ten thousand illustrated women by the artist Yam Karkai, launched in July 2021 as a deliberate counter to a market whose founders and buyers were overwhelmingly men. Reese Witherspoon bought one and her company Hello Sunshine signed a 2022 deal to develop the characters; Christie's sold a piece from the set. The collection that got the celebrity endorsement the others were trying for.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

The company behind the Bored Apes, founded by two pseudonymous writers in Florida, which by March 2022 had bought CryptoPunks and Meebits, launched ApeCoin, sold the Otherside land and raised $450 million at a reported $4 billion valuation. It then spent years shedding weight: staff cuts, the punks handed to a foundation, Moonbirds and Meebits sold on. The studio that owned the boom.

▸ 2021peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

A platform where artists deposit a generative program and buyers mint outputs they have not yet seen, each one produced from the transaction hash, launched in November 2020 by the Houston-based Erick Calderon. Home to the Chromie Squiggle, Fidenza and Ringers, and the site of the 2021 summer in which generative art became the respectable end of the NFT market. Still running, still curated.

▸ 2020peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Chromie Squiggle

A wobbly line of rainbow gradient, Art Blocks project number zero, made by the platform's founder as a test. Around 9,800 of a possible 10,000 were minted before minting was paused in 2021 for slow release. Individual squiggles have sold for the reported equivalent of millions of dollars; one 'Perfect Spectrum' went for around 945 ETH in 2021. The doodle that became the deed to the platform.

▸ 2020peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Short for degenerate — a gambler, self-described, who buys things at 3 a.m. and calls it research. A word that went from insult to identity in the 2020 boom and is now a job title on more profiles than the record can count.

▸ 2020peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Hope as a drug — the belief that the next one will be the one, inhaled from a Pepe-shaped tank. The forward-looking twin of copium, and the substance most of the trenches run on.

▸ 2020peak 2022still up

● Alivev.✎ 3

To create an NFT by writing it to the blockchain for the first time, and by extension to buy one at launch, before it exists on any marketplace. The verb of the boom: you did not buy a picture, you minted it, usually at midnight, usually against a bot, usually with a gas fee larger than the picture. 'Mint' also became the noun for the event itself and the adjective for anything that had just happened.

▸ 2020peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Video highlights of NBA plays sold as 'Moments' in sealed packs by Dapper Labs, the CryptoKitties company, with a LeBron James dunk selling for $208,000 in February 2021 and reported monthly sales in the hundreds of millions that winter. The product that took NFTs to sports fans who had never heard the word, and the subject of a class action a court allowed to proceed; Dapper reportedly settled in 2024.

▸ 2020peak 2021still up

● Alivephr.✎ 3

The entire thesis, stated in three words by people who had stopped pretending there was another one. 'Number go up' is both a description and, when it happens, a celebration; the record files it as the most honest sentence in the scene.

▸ 2020peak 2021still up

↺ Undeadn.✎ 3

Two frames of a cat — mouth closed, mouth open — that became a reaction, then a clicking game in which countries competed by nation, then, in late 2023, the mascot of the year's cat season on Solana. A meme that died as a reaction and came back as a market.

▸ 2020peak 2021†2021

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

An early open marketplace, launched in 2020, where anyone could mint and list without invitation, and the first to distribute a governance token to its traders — which drew the first wave of wash trading for tokens, a year before LooksRare made it famous. Lost most of its trade to OpenSea by 2021 and turned into infrastructure for other people's marketplaces.

▸ 2020peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

The second dog: a Doge imitation launched in 2020 as a joke about the first joke, which rose in 2021 to a size that made a lot of people briefly rich and a lot more briefly sure they would be. The record's entry for the sequel that outgrew the original's fans.

▸ 2020peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Wash Trading (NFT)

Selling an NFT to yourself — from one wallet to another — to inflate its price history, its collection's volume, or your share of a marketplace's token rewards. Present since 2020, industrial from January 2022, when a token-rewarding marketplace briefly showed the largest volume in the world. Chainalysis's February 2022 report put the practice on the record; the practice did not mind.

▸ 2020peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Five hundred and twelve pieces of ASCII-style generative art produced and stored entirely on the Ethereum chain, released by Larva Labs in April 2019 for 0.2 ETH each with proceeds to the climate charity 350.org. The first on-chain generative art collection, made two years before the phrase was fashionable, and now priced as an antique.

▸ 2019peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

A game of breeding and fighting cartoon creatures, each one an NFT, that became a job in the Philippines in 2021: players earned a token by winning matches, 'scholarship' schemes lent creatures to people who could not afford them, and for a few months a good player made more than a local wage. The token fell in 2022 and the wage went with it.

▸ 2018peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

The long cold stretch after a boom — the phrase for 2018–19 and again for 2022–23, borrowed from 'nuclear winter' with the drama intact. The scene's word for the season when the memes stop and the survivors post about building.

▸ 2018peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

A digital card game in the Hearthstone mould whose cards are NFTs, built by the Australian studio that went on to become Immutable. Around since 2018, it survived the 2021 boom and the 2022 collapse by the simple method of being a game people played anyway; the card prices came and went and the ladder kept running.

▸ 2018peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

A French fantasy football game in which players collect licensed player cards as tokens and enter them in weekly competitions, launched in 2019 and by September 2021 the holder of a $680 million funding round led by SoftBank at a reported $4.3 billion valuation. League deals followed, and so did a British Gambling Commission inquiry into whether it was gambling, reportedly dropped in 2024.

▸ 2018peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

The curated single-edition art marketplace from 2018 that positioned itself as the gallery end of the market — one artist, one work, a ten per cent royalty — and had its year in 2021 when the works it had been selling for hundreds of dollars sold for hundreds of thousands. Launched a token in August 2021 and handed curation to holders. Still open, quieter.

▸ 2018peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

A London artist working in glitching, flickering GIFs of skulls, screens and slogans, selling on SuperRare from around 2018 and by 2021 among the most expensive living digital artists. 'Right-click and Save As guy', named after the standard insult to NFT owners, sold for a reported 1,600 ETH — about $7 million — to Snoop Dogg's Cozomo de' Medici persona in December 2021. The artist who made the joke into the asset.

▸ 2018peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

The type: confident, tanned, a laser-eyed avatar, a thread about why you are wrong, a Miami address. A stereotype so complete that the record can describe it without naming anyone, which is the definition of a type.

▸ 2017peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Cartoon cats that could be bred to produce new cartoon cats, launched in November 2017 and within a week responsible for a reported tenth or more of all Ethereum traffic, slowing the network and pushing up fees. The Genesis kitty sold for around 246 ETH, reported at about $110,000. The first NFT collection most people heard of, and the first to break something.

▸ 2017peak 2018still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Ten thousand 24-by-24 pixel characters — humans, zombies, apes and nine aliens — given away for the cost of gas in June 2017 and later treated as the founding document of the profile-picture trade. Larva Labs sold the collection to Yuga Labs in March 2022; Yuga handed it to a non-profit foundation in 2025. The record files it as the one that predates the word 'NFT' in ordinary use.

▸ 2017peak 2021still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Decentraland Land

Parcels of a browser-based virtual world, sold as NFTs from 2017 and treated in 2021 as real estate: a plot reportedly sold for $2.4 million in November 2021 to a company planning virtual fashion shows. In October 2022 an analytics firm's count of 38 daily active users went round the world; Decentraland disputed the method. Both the sale and the count are on file.

▸ 2017peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Human-readable names ending in .eth that point to an Ethereum address, launched in 2017 and reissued as standard tokens in 2019, which made a domain name tradable like a picture. By late 2021 displaying yourname.eth on Twitter was the profile-picture era's business card; a governance token airdrop that November rewarded early registrants. Filed under 'NFT' because that is what the names technically became.

▸ 2017peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

A black-and-white photograph of a man with an impossible jaw, from a Russian art project, adopted as the image of the ultimate Chad — and used since for anyone who does something confidently and correctly. The face of 'average X fan versus average Y enjoyer'.

▸ 2017peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

The marketplace where most of the NFT boom happened: founded in 2017, valued at a reported $13.3 billion in January 2022, the month its trading volume reportedly passed $5 billion, and then eaten from below by Blur through 2023. Laid off staff twice, rebuilt its site as 'OS2' in 2025, and remains the address people mean when they say 'the marketplace'. It outlived its rivals mostly by being there first.

▸ 2017peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

The classic: buy a thinly traded asset, promote it until the price rises, sell into the buyers you attracted. A penny-stock term, prosecuted under securities law for decades, adopted in crypto by 2017 as the name of both a fraud and an organised pastime. 'PnD groups' on Telegram openly scheduled pumps of small coins, and members discovered the organisers had bought first.

▸ 2017peak 2021still up

● Aliveadj.✎ 3

Wrecked — liquidated, wiped out, done — spelled the way a gamer spells it, and the scene's word for a loss too big to joke about, so it jokes about it. 'Got rekt' is the record's most-used two-word obituary for a portfolio.

▸ 2017peak 2022still up

◐ Dyingphr.✎ 3

'When Lamborghini?' — the question that follows any price rise, spelled wrong on purpose, and the origin of 'wen' as a word: wen moon, wen token, wen anything. The 2017 joke that gave the scene its spelling of 'when'.

▸ 2017peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

'Help Helper' — a badly drawn, innocent, worried Pepe from a Finnish board, who says things like 'fren' and asks for help and is the frog's gentle cousin. Adopted in 2024 as a mascot in the frog family, which he joined without losing the anxiety.

▸ 2016peak 2024still up

● Alivephr.✎ 2

Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins

The warning that anything held on someone else's platform is theirs, not yours — said after every collapse, ignored before the next one. The scene's proverb, and the one it relearns every cycle.

▸ 2014peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Someone left holding an asset after everyone else has sold — the bag, the holding, the loss with a strap. From old trading slang into the internet's vocabulary, and now used about a Funko Pop collection, a streaming service, or an ex.

▸ 2013peak 2022still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

The commission-free trading app that taught a generation to buy stocks from a phone, then became a meme three separate times. Founded in 2013 under the corporate name Spacetime Industries, after an even earlier working name, Cash Cat, it launched in 2015 with confetti animations and no fees. In January 2021 it restricted buying of GameStop at the height of the WallStreetBets squeeze and became, for a week, the most hated app on the internet. In July 2026 it launched Robinhood Chain, a Layer 2 built for tokenised assets, and the internet immediately used it to launch memecoins about Robinhood's own origin story. On file because every phase produced a different joke.

▸ 2013peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Any coin with no purpose beyond being traded, which in practice means most of them. Coined on Bitcoin forums as an insult for the first wave of altcoins and adopted by the memecoin era as an honest job description: people who trade shitcoins call them shitcoins, and use the word with something close to affection. The genre's plain name.

▸ 2013peak 2021still up

● Alivephr.✎ 3

The destination of any price that is going up — 'to the moon!' — with the rocket emoji, from the 2013 forums to the 2021 boom and into every group chat about anything rising, including a sourdough. The scene's oldest cheer, still in use.

▸ 2013peak 2021still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Bitcoin Pizza Day

The anniversary of a man buying two pizzas for ten thousand bitcoins in 2010, celebrated every May as the most expensive meal in history. The scene's founding myth, and the reason 'pizza' is a unit of regret.

▸ 2010peak 2021still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

The Shiba Inu in the Doge photograph, rescued from a shelter by Atsuko Sato in Sakura, Japan, and photographed in 2010 with the sidelong look that became the meme and, later, the coin. She died on 24 May 2024, aged around 18, after a long illness; her owner announced it on Instagram. A bronze statue of her, paid for by Doge holders, had been unveiled in a park in Sakura the previous November.

▸ 2010peak 2013†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer from Wisconsin who made and posted one image every day from May 2007, built a following on grotesque satirical 3D renders, and in March 2021 became the third most expensive living artist at auction when Christie's sold the collage of those images for $69.3 million. 'Human One', a moving sculpture, sold that November for a reported $28.9 million. The artist the market chose.

▸ 2007peak 2021still up

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

The green lime that gave a generation both its music library and its viruses. Shut by injunction in 2010 and resurrected as an NFT marketplace, which is the only fate worse than the injunction.

▸ 2000peak 2006†2010