Cooking
 Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki | |
| part of speech | verb, present participle |
|---|---|
| scene | Solana trenches, crypto Twitter |
Slang indicating that a token, chart, or person is building momentum or doing productive work, most familiar from the phrase "let him cook.
Cooking is approving slang for productive momentum. In the trenches it is applied to tokens ("this coin is cooking"), to charts showing steady accumulation, and to people, most often the dev of a coin who is visibly working ("dev is cooking"). The imperative form "let him cook" asks observers to withhold judgment and give someone room to execute. The inverse, "cooked," means finished or doomed, as in "that chart is cooked."
Usage
On crypto Twitter, "cooking" signals conviction without a concrete claim: it asserts that something good is in progress. A trader might post a chart with no caption but "cooking," or defend a silent developer with "let him cook." Communities use "we are cooking" as a rallying phrase during a climb toward graduation or a new mcap milestone (see mcap and fdv). Because the word is pure vibes, it is also a staple of shill posts and engagement farming, where "something is cooking" teases an announcement that may never come.
History
The phrase family comes from hip hop and sports culture, not crypto. Know Your Meme attributes "let that boy cook" to rapper Lil B, who used it in a 2010 video, and documents its spread through NBA commentary, where James Harden's pot stirring celebration popularized "cooking" for a player on a hot streak. The phrase went broadly viral on Twitter and TikTok around 2022 and 2023, and crypto communities absorbed it during the same period. The pejorative "cooked," meaning ruined or exhausted, spread through internet slang in the mid 2020s and was adopted in the trenches for dead charts and blown accounts. None of these senses originated in crypto; the trenches simply gave them a market flavored home.