Hodl

Part of speech: verb, noun

Definitions

1. To keep digital currency in one's possession as a long-term investment strategy, resisting the urge to sell despite market volatility
2. To maintain ownership of cryptocurrency holdings over an extended period rather than trading or selling them in response to price changes
3. To refrain from selling one's digital assets and instead maintain them as an investment, regardless of short-term market movements

Etymology: The word began as a typo. On December 18, 2013, a user of the Bitcoin Talk forum, known as GameKyuubi, posted a thread titled "I AM HODLING," urging people to keep their bitcoins through a sharp market crash. Other users mocked the misspelling of "hold" in the title, but the slip stuck, and the spelling came to mean staying put rather than selling in a downturn. The backronym "Hold On for Dear Life" appeared later, and it is a retrofit: the letters were read into a phrase that fit the sense of clinging to an asset through turmoil. The term is a deliberate-seeming echo of the original spelling error, which is why it has stayed in the crypto community's vocabulary.

Synonyms: hold

Antonyms: sell, dump