protos.com
Earlier this week, crypto OG Jordan Fish, a.k.a. Cobie. responded to a claim on X that TikTok coins are “the next meta in the trenches” with the (perfectly reasonable) question, “What are TikTok Coins?”
What followed was a flood of playfully youthful and rather cagey answers.
The claims about TikTok coins are rife online and have even been flagged by the likes of Pump Fun founder Alon Cohen. But what are they?
Unfortunately, as Cobie discovered, the answer is far from straightforward — particularly if you ask a social media platform full of tech-savvy and terminally online young people who’ve developed their own lingo to route around unwelcome adult supervision.
Luckily, after dozens of evasive replies, someone finally threw Cobie a small bone: “TikTok coins are what Chill Guy was back in the day ser,” they explained.
Chill Guy is a viral meme from October 2023, which shows a cartoon dog in a sweater and jeans exuding an air of supreme nonchalance.
TikTok users, including crypto traders, invoke Chill Guy to convey indifference or equanimity during an otherwise stressful situation.
The helpful commenter continued to explain TikTok coins. “Basically anything relevant to normies, like jestermaxxing, etc.”
Jestermaxxing is a term that originated in incel (involuntarily celibate) communities and graduated to mean the general development of humor skills in order to gain social acceptance or romantic interest.
It often takes the form of social media posts featuring exaggerated movements and obvious silliness intended to encourage laughter for validation.
Indeed, many posts about TikTok coins use expressive antics for manufactured humor, in addition to some incel tropes. Almost all of them use Gen Z slang such as anime, pop culture, or meme references.
TikTok coins aren’t for boomers
In the broadest sense, TikTok coins are memecoins based on TikTok trends or whose promoters focus on TikTok content rather than the crypto industry’s legacy social media platforms of Reddit, X, Telegram, and Discord.
Many of the popular TikTok coins are simply memecoins targeting younger audiences or based on youth jargon. The coins often trade on Solana and originate on easy-to-use platforms like Pump Fun.
The coin names aren’t secrets per se. Indeed, the use of cant language when speaking about TikTok coins has almost nothing to do with coins themselves, but rather with TikTok.
For older crypto traders who rely on X and other platforms for information, their poor familiarity with TikTok trends naturally places them into the outgroup. TikTok coins aren’t for them.
Whether they’re good for TikTok users or any ingroup is doubtful and another question altogether.