GM! The DeFi Dictionary Brimmed With Memes in 2021

This article is part of our Year in Review series.

GMI

Are WAGMI? Am I GMI or NGMI?

Questions like these are deeply important to web3 participants as they navigate the terrain of rug pulls, psyops, anonymous shills, and pump and dump schemes in their efforts to “make it.”

What “making it” means is a subjective matter making the rallying cry of WAGMI all the more effective as the meme can be used to get anyone involved in almost any project.

(3,3)

The (3,3) meme emerged from OlympusDAO as the project strives to become a global unit-of-account and medium-of-exchange currency. The meme originally comes from a table to represent a situation in game theory; (3,3) is placed at the top left corner of the table signaling the most beneficial scenario for all parties involved. It’s a situation where both participants stand to equally win together and lose together.

In the case of OlympusDAO, (3,3) represents the choice to stake your OHM tokens, earning rebase rewards and taking supply off the market, hence benefitting yourself and OHM holders.

Since then people have put all sorts of things between two apostrophes. Standouts include scrolls, which represents participation in the group effort to buy an original copy of the U.S. constitution.

GM

A classic. Stands for “good morning” and means the same. A standard greeting in web3 streamlined to save precious seconds in a world where time is not only money, but a lot of money.

Gm also builds comradery. You could call a unit of minimum viable participation in web3 circles. The meme has also evolved to include “ge” and “gn”. It even included “bd” for bom dia, when a large number of Ethereans travelled to Portugal for ETHLisbon. Still, note that it actually being morning when saying “gm” may be of minimal importance.

ooooor

Taking out an “e” and adding a good amount of the letter “o” to many informal roles in crypto. There’s the airdrop misooor who misses every airdrop despite being online 24/7. There’s the tax remindooor who, unsurprisingly likes to remind everyone they’re not making as much money as they think they are. And of course there’s the crypto reportooor, who enjoys informing (even against overwhelming evidence) that blockchains are only used for crime – of course, we’re not that kind of crypto reportooor here at The Defiant.

Looks Rare

People use this one for NFTs. It’s a simple way to pump your bags or someone else’s. With rare NFTs generally fetching higher prices, the less common the better.

Rarity becomes somewhat of an obsession for some. While one-of-one NFTs are intrinsically one of a kind, 10,000 token drops often involve a mixing and matching of various traits. For example, there are only nine CryptoPunks of the alien variety and only three for sale with the cheapest going for over $90M.

Looks rare indeed.

Like all good memes, “looks rare” has grown beyond its origins — the phrase has even reached the degree of cultural saturation that people are also saying their newborns “look rare.”

Probably Nothing

Used when it’s actually probably something, as in something of note.

Big announcement? Probably nothing. Groundbreaking development? Probably nothing. It’s one of the few phrases that can properly be identified as sarcasm on Twitter, which makes “probably nothing,” pretty useful.

Rug Pull

What happened to your favorite project? That’s so weird. The developers just stopped interacting with the Discord after running a 10,000 profile picture NFT sale netting them tens of millions of dollars.

You just got rug pulled. A rug pull is a malicious act by which a project’s leaders take your money and run, leaving you holding a bunch of their worthless tokens, thus “pulling the rug” from under you.

Getting “rug pulled” has evolved beyond crypto scams – Did you need to cancel your holidays at the last minute? Rug pulled by Covid. Actually, Codid-19 still being a thing probably beats DeFi forks as humanity’s largest rug pull in 2021.

Ultra-Sound Money

Less of a joke. Often denoted visually with the bat emoji next to the one with a speaker and three sound waves.

The Ultra Sound Money money is a play on Bitcoin, which people refer to as “sound money,” because of its 21M BTC cap. Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 includes a burning mechanism which removes some ETH from supply with every transaction. This leads to the possibility that ETH actually becomes a deflationary currency, making it more “sound” than Bitcoin.

Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake may lower ETH issuance to the point that burned ETH from EIP-1559 outweighs the new currency minted. This would officially make Ethereum deflationary, while Bitcoin retains a hard supply cap.