Memecoin slang decoded by life stage: from launch to rug, with the on-chain check for each word

Fourteen memecoin words arranged in the order a token lives them: launch, run, exit. Each is tied to the event on-chain behind it and to the place where you can verify it yourself.

Published: 6 November 2026

Slang you can audit

Most slang cannot be proven wrong. Memecoin slang often can. Words such as bundled, bonded or dev sold each assert that something specific happened on a public ledger, which means a claim can be confirmed or refuted by opening the right page.

This guide arranges the vocabulary the way a token lives it. A token is launched, runs for a while and ends, so the terms fall into three groups: those about the launch, those about the run, and those about the exit. For each word you get what it claims, the event behind it and the place to look. For the place where these words are spoken, see what the trenches mean in crypto.

Stage one, the launch

Bonding curve

A bonding curve is the pricing formula a launchpad uses before a token has a real market. Pump.fun's documentation describes it as a constant-product market maker, the same math as Uniswap: a virtual reserve of SOL and one of the token, multiplied into a constant. Each buy pushes the price up, each sell pushes it down, and large orders get a worse average price than small ones.

A toy case with round numbers, not Pump.fun's real reserves. A curve holds 100 SOL and 1,000,000 tokens, so one token costs 0.0001 SOL. A buyer adds 5 SOL. To keep the product fixed, the curve hands out 47,619 tokens, an average of about 0.000105 SOL each, and the next token now costs about 0.00011 SOL, roughly 10% more than before the trade. Early buyers get the most tokens per SOL, which is why the first block is so crowded.

Pump.fun's fee page, as last updated in October 2026, shows 1.25% on each curve trade, of which 0.30% goes to the token's creator and 0.95% to the platform. Creating a token costs nothing.

Fair launch

The claim: no presale and no team allocation, so everyone buys on the same curve at the same terms. The check: the holder list for the first block. A launch that was bundled is not a fair launch, whatever the post says.

Sniper

A sniper buys in the first block, or in the first seconds, nearly always with a bot, and sells within minutes. Two kinds exist. Independent snipers race everyone for the cheapest tokens. Creator-funded snipers are the creator in disguise, and Solidus Labs calls deployer-funded same-block sniping a pattern specific to Pump.fun.

Pine Analytics measured both in April 2025. More than half of new Pump.fun tokens were sniped in the block that created them. Where the creator had sent SOL to the sniping wallet beforehand, more than 4,600 sniper wallets working with over 10,400 creators earned more than 15,000 SOL in a month; 87% of those snipes made a profit and over 55% were fully sold in under a minute.

The check: set the wallet's first buy next to the creation transaction, then trace where its SOL came from. A transfer from the creator just before launch settles it. Terminals show a "Snipers %" figure.

Bundled

A bundled token is one whose supply was bought at launch through many wallets run by one party, usually the creator. Decrypt, reporting Bubblemaps' analysis of a celebrity-promoted token in October 2024, explained that bundling creates several wallets to buy the same token, so that what looks like many small holders is one party with a large share. Bubblemaps found 60% of that token's supply bundled at launch and $500,000 sold within 12 hours.

The tools are ordinary Solana ones used misleadingly. Jito's documentation describes a bundle as up to five transactions that run in order, in the same slot, all or nothing, with a tip to win a place. Creation and a series of buys can land together before anyone can react, and crypto.news describes creators buying big allocations in the same transaction or block as the launch.

The check: open the token in a block explorer, find the creation transaction and list the wallets that bought in that slot. Fresh wallets with no history, funded minutes earlier from one address, are the signature, and a holder map often draws them as a single cluster. Terminals show a "Bundle %".

Insiders and dev holding

"Insiders" are wallets tied to the creator that hold supply from the start. "Dev holding" is the share of supply still sitting in the creator's own address. Check the holder map for links back to the creator, and compare the creator's balance with total supply. Axiom's documentation lists dev holding, top 10 holders, snipers, insiders and bundle shares as filters on its new-token feed. The tool computes these figures, so the explorer is where you confirm them.

Stage two, the run

KOL

KOL means key opinion leader (more in KOL meaning), a marketing term for influencers hired in a niche market, as a 2024 CoinDesk column put it, adding that tokens are often handed to KOLs as incentives. In memecoin slang a KOL is any account large enough to move a price by posting a ticker. In March 2025 the analytics firm Arkham added a tag that follows the wallets of X accounts with more than 100,000 followers, covering more than 950 addresses as of March 8, 2025 (The Block).

The on-chain question is sequence. Did the account's wallet receive tokens from the creator before the post, buy minutes ahead of it, or sell into it? Undisclosed paid promotion is a legal matter in many places (the rules finfluencers have to follow), and the business model behind it is in how crypto influencers make money.

Cabal

A cabal is a suspected group of insiders who coordinate around a token: they buy it early, often through several wallets, promote it through accounts they run or pay, and sell into the buyers that promotion attracts. Decrypt, glossing the word in August 2024, described insiders collaborating to promote specific tokens, the everyday sense of a secret faction transplanted onto a chart. "Cabal coin" is mostly an accusation that insiders control the supply.

On-chain, a cabal looks like wallets funded from a shared source that buy the same launches at the same moment and sell together. Bubblemaps draws a token's top 250 holders as bubbles sized by holdings and links two bubbles when the wallets have transferred funds to each other. Its own documentation treats a cluster as a question: it might be an employer paying staff, an investor receiving tokens, or someone covering their tracks.

What has been documented.

• In March 2025 Bloomberg reported, as summarized by CryptoSlate, that Solana had become fertile ground for groups that specialize in memecoin launches. They allegedly match creators with influencers, give KOLs big allocations or heavily discounted buys in return for promotion, and profit from short-lived spikes before the tokens fade. Those claims come from market participants and analysts quoted in the article, not from a regulator.
• Chainalysis found that about 94% of the pools linked to suspected pump-and-dump tokens launched in 2024 appeared to be emptied by the address that created them, and in some cases the creator and that address were funded from the same source, which it says may suggest coordination. Its method follows behavior, not intent.
• In August 2024, a Pump.fun token named CABAL airdropped 20% of its supply to ten crypto influencers and called it a social experiment. Most sold at once. Two days on, three still held, and its market value had slid from a peak of $848,000 to $164,000, Decrypt reported.

The thread running through these cases is that coordination leaves traces: early wallets with one funder, allocations to promoters, sales right after the hype. Insiders like these need buyers, which is what traders call exit liquidity.

When it is cope. Since some groups are real, every dump can be blamed on one, and that claim can never be refuted. A working rule: if someone says "cabal" without pointing to wallets, funding links or disclosed allocations, they are describing a feeling. Prices also fall because ordinary holders sell. When you do hold evidence, describe the behavior ("the top wallets were funded by the deployer") rather than conjuring a shadowy group, and never pin it on a named person absent a finding by a regulator or a court.

The word itself. It predates crypto. It comes from French cabale and medieval Latin cabbala, from the Hebrew word that also gives Kabbalah, according to Wiktionary. It is also loaded: Wikipedia notes that it is sometimes used as an antisemitic dog whistle, and the Anti-Defamation League says that the QAnon belief in a global "cabal" has roots in the antisemitic blood libel trope. One more reason to name the behavior you can show instead of the word.

Bonded

A token has bonded (also called graduated or migrated) when it completes its curve. According to Pump.fun's documentation, once the token's market value on the curve hits the graduation threshold, the curve closes and the whole liquidity pool moves in one step to PumpSwap, its own exchange; graduation is automatic and irreversible, and the pool belongs to the protocol. The fee page lists a one-time graduation fee of 0.015 SOL.

The threshold is reached in SOL, so its dollar value moves with the SOL price. The Block put it near $69,000 of market value in March 2025, when tokens still migrated to Raydium for a 6 SOL fee; crypto.news gave about 85 SOL of purchases in 2026, and Raydium's own launchpad, LaunchLab, graduates tokens at 85 SOL as well.

Few get there. About 1.4% of Pump.fun tokens had reached Raydium by August 2024 (The Block), the weekly rate stayed under 1% for four weeks from February 17, 2025 (Cointelegraph), and crypto.news puts the overall rate below 2%. Terminals mirror the path in columns: on Axiom's feed there are new pairs, a "final stretch" for curves near completion, and migrated.

Bonding is a milestone, not an endorsement. The curve completes once enough SOL has gone in, whoever sent it, and that includes bundles and snipers.

Stage three, the exit

Dev sold

"Dev" is the token's creator, and "dev sold" means the creator's address has sold its tokens. A newcomer sees a warning. Many memecoin traders see the opposite: Decrypt reported in January 2025 that traders dislike a creator who still holds a large share, so "a dev dumping is, ironically, bullish". A creator with a big position is a sale waiting to happen, while one at zero has nothing left to sell.

Some creators sell as a business. The same report followed one wallet that launched 17,794 tokens in three months and made over $840,000, mostly by buying its own tokens at launch and selling within seconds.

The catch is that "the dev" is an address and not a person. Researchers who studied all 15 million coins launched on Pump.fun over two years counted hiding the creator's addresses among five recurring manipulation strategies (Szwajcok and co-authors, 2026). The check: read the creator's address and the wallets it funded. A dev that "sold" may still hold through others.

CTO

CTO is community takeover. CoinMarketCap's glossary defines it as the moment a project's original creators abandon it and its holders assume development and direction. Its example: in July 2024, a Solana memecoin launched on Pump.fun went through a takeover after its developer sold everything soon after launch. Holders took over the social accounts, and the token went on to pass $100 million of market value.

Takeovers have infrastructure of their own. DEX Screener, the price-tracking site, lists Community Takeover among its three paid products, says unapproved takeover orders are not refunded, and lists takeovers in its public API with a claim date and the new icon, header, description and links.

What a CTO leaves alone is the supply. The check: look at the creator's address (an abandoned token typically shows a zero balance and no activity), find the claim and its date on DEX Screener, then open the holder map. If the top wallets are the same insiders as before the claim date, the takeover changed the face of the token and not who holds it.

Rug and soft rug

A rug, or rug pull, leaves holders with tokens they cannot sell at any useful price. Chainalysis applies a strict test: an address that added liquidity to a pool and later pulled at least 65% of it, worth $1,000 or more, from a pool that had gained traction and then went quiet. By that test, about 94% of the pools tied to suspected pump-and-dump tokens launched in 2024 appeared rugged by the address that created them.

On a launchpad, the creator cannot pull a pool the protocol owns, so the rug becomes a sale: insiders buy at the bottom of the curve and sell into later buyers, as crypto.news puts it. A soft rug is the slow version. Cointelegraph described it in 2021 as founders dumping their own tokens and leaving, rather than taking users' assets, and Ledger's glossary stresses that it is gradual. Solidus Labs found soft-rug characteristics in about 93% of 388,000 Raydium pools. The check: a liquidity-removal transaction for a rug; steady sells from team wallets, a falling holder count and quiet accounts for a soft one.

Jeet

A jeet is someone who sold early. Nothing on-chain marks the sale out from any other, so there is nothing to check; the word is the problem (see the note in the Crypto Twitter slang glossary).

Which tool settles which word

A six-step audit of any new token

None of this predicts where the price goes. It only tests the story told about the token.

1. Copy the contract address (the CA) from the launchpad page, never from a reply or a direct message. Copycat coins with the same name are among the five strategies in the Pump.fun study above.
2. Find the creation transaction in a block explorer. Its signer is the creator, and its history shows whether this is a first launch or the five-hundredth. An address that has launched hundreds of tokens runs a process, not a project.
3. Read the holders. Note the top 10 share (leave out the curve or pool account) and the creator's balance.
4. Read the first block. Which wallets bought in the creation slot, and did the creator or one shared address fund them?
5. Open a holder map and look for clusters among the top holders and links back to the creator.
6. Line up posts and trades. When a large account posts the ticker, see what its known wallets did before and after.

The claim with no transaction behind it: a screenshot

Each term above points at a transaction. The memecoin win posted as an image does not: a profit card or a wallet total can be cropped, picked from many tries or composed, and it carries no address to check. Five tells in a wallet screenshot lists what gives a composed one away, and the on-chain count of memecoin millionaires shows how rare the real ones are.

Composed screens have honest uses too, in skits and explainers about this culture. Flexdger Wallet is a mockup of a crypto wallet app built for that: every amount is typed in, nothing is held, and our terms of use forbid presenting a screen as a real balance. A visible Mockup label belongs in every clip. For the rest of the vocabulary, from gm to PvP, see the Crypto Twitter slang glossary.

Sources

• Pump.fun docs: bonding curve, 2026
• Pump.fun docs: fees, 2026
• Jito Labs: low latency transaction send and bundles, 2026
• Bubblemaps: how it works, 2026
• Axiom documentation: Pulse, 2026
• Solidus Labs: 2025 Rug Pull Report on Solana, 2025
• Chainalysis: market manipulation in 2025, 2025
• Pine Analytics: Exit Liquidity Machines, 2025
• Decrypt: the CABAL token airdrop to influencers, 2024
• Decrypt: the wallet that launched 17,000 meme coins, 2025
• Decrypt: insiders profiting from a celebrity-themed Solana meme coin, 2024
• CoinMarketCap Academy: Community Takeover, 2024
• CryptoSlate on Bloomberg: Solana memecoin cabals, 2025
• Anti-Defamation League: cabal, 2026
• Wiktionary: cabal, 2026
• Wikipedia: Cabal, 2026