phrase · first recorded 2010 · status: emerging
wagmi
1."We're all gonna make it": collective optimism that the project, the group, or the whole scene will succeed. Also used ironically to mock exactly that confidence.
The launch has been chaotic, but the team is still shipping, so wagmi.
01Origin
The phrase is generally traced to Russian-Australian bodybuilder and internet personality Aziz "Zyzz" Shavershian, who encouraged his followers with variants of "we're all going to make it" around 2010. A widely circulated motivational video containing the line was uploaded posthumously in 2012, after Shavershian's death in 2011.
The saying and its acronym migrated from bodybuilding forums and 4chan into trading communities, then became ubiquitous on Crypto Twitter during the 2020-2021 crypto and NFT boom. By late 2021, Pepsi and Budweiser were exchanging WAGMIs in brand promotions, the traditional sign that insider slang has died and gone to marketing.
It survives in SF as the optimist's counterweight to ngmi, deployed with the same sincerity-irony superposition as everything else here, and as a reminder that half this lexicon (see uggmaxxing, locked in) traces back to the same bodybuilding forums.
02Notable sightings
Statelayer · @statelayerJust learned that WAGMI and NGMI don't even come from crypto. This space is a sham.
03Spread the ism
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