Community Glossary — Terms Defined

Community

Token community — The people who hold, use, or follow a project and communicate with it and each other.

Organic growth — Members arriving because the project is worth following, rather than in response to an incentive. Slower, and it retains.

Rented audience — Members acquired through giveaways or paid promotion. Present while the incentive lasts, gone afterwards.

Engagement farming — Low-effort prompts designed to inflate activity metrics. Trains a community that the channel is noise.

Retention — Whether members remain through quiet periods. The metric hardest to fake, because it requires actual interest.

Community-led support — Members answering each other correctly without team intervention. The strongest single indicator of genuine knowledge transfer.

AMA — "Ask Me Anything": a live question session. Valuable in proportion to how directly the hard questions are answered.

Metrics

Vanity metric — A countable figure that is purchasable and therefore uninformative: follower count, member count, impressions, engagement rate.

Holder count — Addresses holding a token. More meaningful than followers, though inflatable by airdropping to controlled addresses.

Wash trading — Trading with oneself to manufacture volume without transferring risk. Cheap, common, and why volume is the least trustworthy metric.

Manufactured signal — Any metric produced deliberately rather than as a by-product of genuine activity — bought followers, farmed engagement, wash-traded volume, airdropped holders.

Transparency

Verifiable claim — A statement someone can check without contacting you. The operative test for whether a disclosure is real.

Doxxing (of a team) — Publishing team members' real identities. Not required for accountability; reachability is.

Pseudonymous team — A team operating under handles rather than legal names. Normal in this industry, and compatible with accountability if roles, authority and contact are clear.

Circulating supply — Tokens actually available to trade, quoted with the date measured.

Vesting schedule — The dates and amounts at which locked tokens become transferable. A schedule means a table, not a sentence.

Cliff — A period during which nothing unlocks, followed by a first release. A concentrated event warranting explicit disclosure.

Lock contract — An on-chain contract holding tokens until a specified time. A verifiable lock is worth far more than a stated intention.

Treasury address — An address holding project funds. Publishable, and discoverable whether or not you publish it.

Privileged function — A contract function ordinary holders cannot call: mint, pause, blacklist, upgrade. Not disqualifying; concealment is.

Incident update — A communication reporting something going wrong. The update that determines whether a project's communications are believed.

Promotion

Disclosure — Stating a paid relationship or holding, in the promotion itself, every time. Required by law in many jurisdictions.

Undisclosed paid promotion — Promoting for payment without saying so. Unlawful in many jurisdictions, and it devalues genuine advocacy by association.

Shilling — Promotion, typically hype-driven and often undisclosed.

Price claim — Any statement about future price, returns, or performance. The category most likely to create legal exposure.

"Not financial advice" — A disclaimer. Helpful on genuinely educational material; not a licence to give advice.

Market manipulation — Coordinated trading or false information intended to move a price. Illegal in most jurisdictions, including casual "we all buy at 8pm" arrangements.

Advance-fee fraud — Payment demanded for something never delivered — a listing, a ranking, a partnership. The dominant fraud aimed at founders.

Holder education

Holder education — Ensuring holders understand what they own, how to hold it safely, and how its market works. A risk control rather than marketing.

Contract address — The unique on-chain identifier of a token. The single most important thing to publish, because names and tickers are not unique.

Impersonator token — A contract deployed using an existing project's name and ticker.

"We never DM first" — A published rule stating the project never initiates private contact. One sentence that defeats the most common attack on holders.

Seed phrase — The master secret controlling a wallet. No legitimate service ever needs it, without exception.

Approval — Permission granted to a contract to move a token. Persists until revoked, and a more common cause of loss than key theft.

Related

• Build a Healthy Token Community
• Project Transparency Guide
• How to Promote a Token Responsibly