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.
“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.
As slang words became commodified, trends emerged. For instance, words and phrases President Trump uses are turned into coins almost instantaneously.
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