Orca Crypto
Culture term

Chad

Approving slang for someone who acts with conviction, often recklessly.

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Updated 2026-08-303 min readDefinition
Definition

Approving slang for someone who acts with conviction, often recklessly.

Chad started as an internet caricature of an overconfident alpha male and settled in crypto as a compliment. A chad buys when others hesitate, holds when others panic, and is celebrated for it, at least when it works.

Gigachad is the intensified version. The mirror image is the wojak or the ngmi, the character who buys the top and sells the bottom.

It is worth noticing that chad is applied after the fact, only to the trades that worked. The same behavior that earns the label in a bull market earns rekt in a bear one, because the label describes the outcome, not the decision.

In practice

Someone who bought a token during a seventy percent drawdown and posted the screenshot gets called a chad if it recovers.

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