Today, I felt it appropriate to give you some backstory about the term “HODL”.

If you’re reading this, you’ve obviously seen the word by now. You may have even thought that I was misspelling the world “hold.” HODL is technically a mispeling of “hold,” but it’s very much intentional.

So where does this word come from?

To understand HODL, first you need to understand what a meme is.

Here’s Urban Dictionary’s definition of meme:

An image, video, or set of text that becomes popular and spreads rapidly via the internet. Some examples of memes are Doge, Pepe, and the YouTuber called Danisnotonfire.

The Internet gets a hold of something — usually something funny — and it goes viral. If you’ve seen a funny picture with giant white letters on it, then you’ve seen a meme. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a picture like that, but that’s a common example.

This is what happened with the world HODL.

Back in 2013, someone was really drunk and posted on the popular Bitcoin talk forum about how they were HODLing their Bitcoin even though the price was going down.

The term has since become acronym for “Hold On for Dear Life” — which is a very accurate term for the feeling you have when you’re holding a bunch of a cryptocurrency and the price starts to crash. But you’re convinced it’s going to go up in the future, and so you Hold On for Dear Life — you HODL.

This is very common in the crypto world because it’s a very volatile market — prices jump up and down all the time. But if you can choose currencies that are overall trending upward, you’ll see good returns on your investments.

I found this article really informative and entertaining as I was learning about what HODL means. Check it out!

HODL is part of the jargon of the crypto world, so you should know what it means. As you start to dive into the crypto world, you’re going to see this term a lot.

Now, you’ll know what it means.

Disclaimer

I am not responsible for your money. Please do your own due diligence when considering investing in anything I mention on this site, even if I'm really excited about it myself.