Every day, Boeshi, a 20-year-old college student (who asked to be referred to by his first name only because of privacy concerns), scrolls through social media, hunting for words in online spaces. Boeshi is hunting for potential new slang coins.
He tracks usage of words like huzz, soyboy, baddie, or mewing, and decides whether or not to invest in meme coins tied to these terms. “These brainrot words, the more they get used, the price of the coin goes up,” he said. “The more the word gets popular, the more the coin gets popular.”
As new Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang words continue to go viral, an entire financialized ecosystem is below the surface. Young people are investing real money into specific terms to capitalize and profit from their virality.
Slang has always been performative and popular among teenagers. But the rise of cryptocurrency and meme coins has, for the first time, created a financial market around words that could be reshaping our language.
How Algospeak Got Commodified
Adam Aleksic, an internet etymologist and author of Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, said that meme coins featuring slang terms are becoming more common.
“Since Dogecoin was the first truly successful memecoin, a lot of other coins popped up that similarly capitalized on trending words,” he said. Dogecoin is a meme coin founded in 2013 that has since reached a market capitalization of $23.4 billion after being boosted by Elon Musk, who recently named his federal agency after it.
Most slang meme coins are pump and dump schemes. Investors want to invest early, while the usage of a word is rising, and then dump at its peak. The market cap for most slang coins is in the thousands or tens of thousands.
However, there is competition over every word, with multiple competing coins for each term. Today, it’s hard for one coin to amass the level of market share Doge coin has enjoyed.
According to Aleksic, these meme coin prospectors are heavily intertwined with internet culture online. They capitalize on whatever slang words are trending because “they know that memes and trends [using that word] will catch more attention than a less socially interesting term,” he said.
In this emergent attention economy, virality equals monetary value. “When a word is trending, you’ll see that it’s relative to the peak of the Google searches,” said Boeshi. “And then the drop is also relevant to the coin’s history.” Currently, dozens of slang word meme coins are available for purchase on the alt crypto site Pump.fun.
Turning Words Into Slang Coins
As slang words became commodified, trends emerged. For instance, words and phrases President Trump uses are turned into coins almost instantaneously. In February, the creator of a meme coin called “Fake Job” promoted it as: New Trump Slang Just Dropped (FAKEJOB).
The word Bidenomics, which MAGA pushed as a disparaging term to describe the economy under Biden, was swiftly turned into a coin. There are dozens of Covfefe coins, tied to a misspelling of “coffee” in a Trump tweet from back in 2017.
After TikTok influencer Jools Lebron’s videos mainstreamed the word “demure,” dozens of coins using the term were launched. Their valuations correlated broadly with usage, most peaking at the end of last year, when Dictionary.com named demure its 2024 Word of the Year. A demure coin launched at that time was promoted as “No.1 Slang of 2024 (DEMURE) Number 1 slang of the year 2024.”
However, Slang coins also raise questions about profit and ownership. Lebron was never given any stake in various demure coins birthed after she popularized the word. Kai Cenat, who popularized the term “rizz,” has also never spoken about receiving free rizz coins.
Many Gen Z slang words are popularized by Black creators or taken from AAVE. But it’s unclear what demographics participate most heavily in the slang coin market.
Because slang words are transient, some meme coin investors consider long-lasting terms the best investment. For instance, the word “chad,” meant to describe an alpha male type figure, is tied to meme coins whose supporters claim retain their value better.
“The [word] chad is from the developmental stages of the internet,” said Boeshi. “These words last a long time because they have a big culture behind them. There are people using this word all the time, then the coin itself starts going up a lot more, and stays up if the culture and the word is relevant.”
New Markets Have Made It Easy To Launch Slang Coins
Another slang meme coin investor known as Phantom said that slang coins really started taking off over the past year and a half. This growth is primarily due to how much easier it has become to launch a coin.
“Before, it was much more difficult to launch tokens,” he said. “You’d have to write out the token, add liquidity, burn liquidity, and stuff like that.” Now, however, myriad platforms like Pump.fun make it easier to launch a coin almost instantaneously.
“The amount of coins launching was probably less than 10% of what it is now,” Phantom added. “These launch pads really lowered the barrier of entry, and kind of just changed the game forever.”
Phantom and other slang coin investors monitor language usage by consuming a massive amount of online content. They look at Instagram and TikTok comment sections where teenagers converse. They spend an inordinate amount of time on X and closely track meme culture and the influencer world.
For instance, last year, the word “bop” became popular slang for an OnlyFans creator or sex worker. When the Bop House, a content house full of OnlyFans creators, launched, dozens of “bop” and “bop house” coins launched.
“The coins come out based on the words that Instagram and TikTok make popular,” Phantom said.
“The market sits there and waits to see what TikTok and IG kids have been saying and what language they’re using. It’s like a live casino where new words come out daily… like skibidi, rizz, huzz, all these new trending terms, people want to gamble on. They’re like, ‘oh this word is trending, let’s create a coin.’”
Slang Coins and Betting On Attention
Aidan Walker, a meme researcher, described slang coin trading as “bets on attention.”
Words are now “discrete units” that can be searched, tracked, and traded. “A word as an asset has no meaning whatsoever, except for people paying attention to it,” he says. “These people will call themselves gamblers, but it’s more like Texas Hold ’Em than a slot machine… They’re trying to read the social media atmosphere of the day.”
Walker and others said that the rise of short-form content and viralflation has led to more slang terms emerging and cycling in and out faster. In the 90s and 00s, slang terms would be used for years. Today, many slang terms blow up and flame out in weeks or months thanks to the internet’s relentless churn.
“Everything is short form so a lot more slang is created naturally,” said Phantom. “People are texting a lot, it makes sense that the language in the vernacular gets shortened too.”
The rise of slang coins has created a phenomenon where the act of repeatedly posting a slang term can be a kind of soft-market manipulation. Word usage is part of a feedback loop that can rapidly inflate the value of a coin.
This is why slang coin holders aggressively spam figures like Musk and other culturally relevant political leaders. The hope is that getting them to use certain words will juice their coin.
Mods Are Sleeping, Make a Slang Coin
Content moderation and platform dynamics also shape the slang coin market. For instance, coins affiliated with internet algospeak have been perennially popular on Pump.fun. These are benign words used in place of more controversial words.
An example of algospeak is swapping the word corn for porn, for instance, to ensure your video didn’t get demonetized. There are coins for different algospeak words, like “unalive,” which people use in place of the word dead. There are also many failed attempts to make words happen. For instance, some speculators tried to mainstream the word “boujee” last year.
“Most used slang word of the year (Boujee),” the description of one coin brags. The community for another boujee coin discussed attempts to get Musk to use the phrase. “Elon would dig it: a coin that’s equal parts flex and interplanetary flex, perfect for tweeting to the moon!” the creator posted. Ultimately, they were unsuccessful, and the word has failed to gain traction.
Even The Word “Word” Has a Coin
Searching for “word of the year” on Pump.fun yields hundreds of results declaring various slang terms are the next hot word. There is now a coin for nearly every word imaginable.
Even the word “word” has multiple coins. One of the “word” coins is described by its creator as being “for everyone who believes that every word matters.”
“In a world where every meme gets its token,” the description for the coin reads, “why not the most powerful currency of all: the humble word? We make no promises, but we think that every $word has a place in meme coin history. Naysayers might argue, “not every word needs a coin.” But we say, every word deserves one.”
Sadly, the highest market cap for any “word” coins seems to have maxed out at around $4,000. However, Walker said these market forces are only beginning to influence our language. “There’s a playbook now for a word to go viral,” he said, “that wasn’t there three or four years ago.”
As we sink further and further into late capitalism, Aleksic said that it’s only natural that our very language is being commodified. “The new breadth of linguistic commercialization corresponds to the greater commodification of our lives,” he said. “These words are all spreading through social media, which inherently operates on the commodification of our free time. It follows that more of our recreational language is getting commodified as well.”
