Larp
 Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki | |
| part of speech | noun and verb |
|---|---|
| scene | Crypto Twitter, Telegram |
Crypto Twitter slang, from live action role playing, for pretending to be something one is not, such as faking trades, wealth, or insider access.
Larp, from the acronym for live action role playing, is internet slang for pretending to be something one is not. On crypto Twitter it denotes fabricated personas and performances: fake profit screenshots, invented insider access, imaginary fund managers, and traders who post positions they never held. The word works as a verb ("he's larping as a whale") and a noun ("that thread was a larp"), with the agent form "larper."
Usage
Accusing someone of larping challenges the authenticity behind their claims. Common trenches larps include posting another wallet's profit and loss card as one's own, claiming to have "called" a coin with a deleted or backdated post, pretending membership in a private alpha group, and manufacturing a reputation as an insider with connections to a token's team. Because trenches status flows from provable onchain results, the standard rebuttal is a demand for receipts: "wallet or larp." Larping shades into outright fraud when the persona is used to sell access or promote tokens, overlapping with shill behavior and with the engagement bait economy described under engagement farming.
History
The acronym LARP comes from the live action role playing game hobby of the 1980s and 1990s, in which participants physically act out fantasy scenarios. Online forums repurposed the word in the 2010s for users acting out fake identities, and it entered crypto vocabulary in the late 2010s; glossaries such as Gate and ChangeHero document its established crypto sense of fabricated wealth or expertise performed for clout. The term was widespread enough by 2019 that the founder of the FTX exchange publicly asked on crypto Twitter what it meant. In the trenches era it remains the default word for performative fakery.