All terms
The invented backstory and running mythology attached to a token or community.
Lore is the shared story a community builds around a token: the origin, the in jokes, the characters, the reasons a particular number or animal matters. For meme coins it is effectively the product, because there is nothing else. The token is a coordination point and the lore is what people are actually coordinating on.
This is not automatically a criticism. Culture is real, it can be durable, and a few tokens have sustained communities for years on nothing but it. It is worth being honest that this is what you are buying, though.
Where it turns dangerous is when lore is used to make selling feel like betrayal, or to explain away a price fall as part of the story. A narrative that has an answer for every piece of bad news is not a strong narrative, it is an unfalsifiable one.
A token whose entire value proposition is a running joke about a dog, sustained by thousands of people who find it funny.
Where to go next
More culture terms
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Some of these land faster in conversation than in writing. Sessions are one to one and you can ask anything, including the things that feel too obvious to ask.