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What Does "Ape" or "Aping In" Mean in Crypto?
In crypto, "aping in" (or simply "aping") means buying into a token, NFT collection, or DeFi protocol rapidly and impulsively—without doing any serious research or due diligence first. The decision is driven almost entirely by FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), social media hype, or the gut feeling that you're about to miss a huge pump.
Think of it like sprinting into a store on Black Friday, grabbing an item off the shelf because everyone else is grabbing it, and only checking the price tag once you're already at the checkout. By the time you realise you overpaid, the sale is over and the crowd has moved on.
A few things tend to characterise aping behaviour:
- Speed over substance: The buy happens within minutes—or seconds—of seeing hype on social media.
- Herd mentality: The decision is often triggered by watching others pile in, not by independent analysis.
- Oversized positions: Aping often involves putting in more capital than is sensible relative to portfolio size.
- Zero due diligence: The team, smart contract, tokenomics, and roadmap are all ignored in the rush.
It's worth noting that aping isn't always purely reckless. Some experienced traders will "ape" into a new token intentionally as a small, high-risk bet—fully aware they might lose everything. The difference is intention and position sizing. But for most people who ape, the driver is pure emotion.
By the numbers: 84% of crypto investors have made at least one FOMO-driven decision, and nearly two-thirds said those emotional decisions hurt their portfolio performance.
Where Did the Term "Ape" Come From?
The term didn't start in crypto. Its roots go back to the stock trading communities of Reddit—specifically r/WallStreetBets—where the rallying cry "apes together strong" became a meme during the GameStop short squeeze of early 2021. The phrase celebrated retail traders banding together to take on hedge funds, with "apes" positioning themselves as scrappy underdogs acting on instinct rather than Wall Street's sophisticated models.
Crypto communities borrowed the term almost immediately, and it evolved during the DeFi Summer of 2020—a period when dozens of new yield farming protocols and tokens were launching every week. Moving fast was practically a requirement: if you waited to research a new protocol, the early-adopter rewards were already gone. Aping became the verb for that behaviour.
The connection to NFTs came a little later, and most visibly with the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). The creators deliberately chose primates as their mascot because "aping in" was already established crypto slang for buying into something with reckless abandon. The name became a self-aware wink at the community's culture—and the collection went on to become one of the most valuable NFT projects in history, with individual apes selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Today the term is used without irony across crypto Twitter, Discord servers, and Telegram groups. For some it's a warning. For others—particularly the degen community—it's almost a badge of honour.
Where Aping Happens: NFTs, DeFi, and Solana Memecoins
Aping shows up across every corner of the crypto ecosystem, but the dynamics look slightly different depending on the context.
NFTs
In the NFT world, aping means buying into a new collection—often within the first hours of mint—based on a celebrity tweet, a Discord announcement, or the fact that a few influential wallets are already holding. Nobody has checked whether the team is doxxed, whether the art has any utility, or whether the project has a roadmap beyond "we'll figure it out." Floor prices can spike 10x in a day and collapse just as fast.
DeFi (Decentralized Finance)
In DeFi, aping typically means depositing funds into a brand-new yield farming protocol to chase astronomical APY percentages—sometimes 1,000% or more—without reading the smart contract or checking whether it's been audited. By the time a DeFi protocol is trending on social media, the early depositors often already have one hand on the exit. Unaudited code is an additional landmine: bugs and exploits have drained hundreds of millions of dollars from protocols whose users ape'd in without a second thought.
Solana Memecoins
Solana has become the undisputed epicentre of memecoin aping. Platforms like Pump.fun allow anyone to launch a token in minutes, and tools like Ape.Pro (built by Jupiter) give traders a one-click terminal to buy into trending tokens the moment they appear on-chain. The network's speed and near-zero fees mean a token can launch, pump, and be abandoned in under an hour. BONK—one of Solana's early community memecoins—is a famous example of a token that rewarded early apes massively. For every BONK, there are thousands of tokens that went to zero the same day they launched.
Scale of the market: In 2024 alone, over 11 million tokens were launched on Solana, many of them memecoins. Platforms like Pump.fun have facilitated over $1 billion in trading volume. The barrier to launching is less than $0.10—which means the barrier to being rugged is equally low.
The Dangers of Aping: What Can Go Wrong
Let's be direct: most people who ape in lose money. Here's why.
Pump-and-Dump Schemes
Coordinated groups hype a token on social media, wait for retail FOMO buyers to push the price up, and then dump their holdings all at once—leaving latecomers holding a worthless bag. A University of Florida study found that 24% of new tokens launched in 2022 showed signs of pump-and-dump manipulation, with investors losing $4.2 billion to these schemes that year alone.
The most infamous example remains the Squid Game token, which was inspired by the Netflix series. The price rose from fractions of a cent to over $2,800 in days, then crashed to effectively zero when the developers executed a rug pull—taking all the liquidity with them.
Rug Pulls and Exit Scams
A rug pull is when a project's developers abandon it after raising funds—draining the liquidity pool or simply vanishing. Unlike a pump-and-dump (which at least involves a real price movement), a rug pull can happen overnight with no warning. Victims have no legal recourse, and losses are typically 100%. The risk is highest with anonymous teams on new projects, which are—not coincidentally—exactly the tokens that get the most aping activity.
Becoming Exit Liquidity
Here's the uncomfortable truth about aping into a trending token: by the time you see it on your feed, the people who will profit have already bought. When you ape in at the top, you are the exit liquidity—your buy is what lets earlier holders sell at a profit. Whales who accumulated early are waiting for the wave of FOMO buys to offload their positions into.
Smart Contract Exploits
New DeFi protocols are especially dangerous because their code is often unaudited. A single bug in a smart contract can allow an attacker to drain all funds in a single transaction. Flash loan attacks, re-entrancy bugs, and oracle manipulation have collectively cost DeFi users billions of dollars. None of these risks are visible to someone aping in based on a tweet.
The Psychological Spiral
Even when a token doesn't outright collapse, aping creates a pattern of emotional decision-making that compounds losses over time. After a bad ape, traders often chase the next shiny token to "make it back"—a gambler's fallacy that leads to escalating risk-taking. Loss aversion bias kicks in, making it hard to admit a bad trade and cut losses early.
Related Crypto Slang You Should Know
Aping doesn't exist in a vacuum. It comes with a full vocabulary of related terms that you'll encounter in the same communities. Here's a quick reference.
| Term | What It Means |
|---|---|
| FOMO | Fear Of Missing Out — the main psychological driver of aping behaviour |
| Degen | Short for "degenerate gambler." A high-risk trader who embraces volatile, early-stage bets. Originally an insult, now often worn as a badge of honour in crypto culture. |
| Rug Pull | An exit scam where developers abandon a project after raising funds, leaving investors with worthless tokens |
| Pump & Dump | Coordinated hype drives a price spike, then insiders sell all at once — leaving retail buyers with losses |
| Diamond Hands | Holding a token through severe volatility without panic-selling |
| Paper Hands | Selling quickly at the first sign of a price drop — often what apes do after realising they overpaid |
| Exit Liquidity | The late buyers whose purchases let earlier holders sell at a profit — classic aping outcome |
| DYOR | Do Your Own Research — the direct antidote to aping |
For anyone who wants to protect themselves before buying into a new Solana token, our Solana Rug Checker guide walks you through the tools and red flags to look out for before committing funds.
How to Ape Responsibly (If You Must)
Look—nobody's going to tell you not to trade. But if you're going to take shots on new, unproven tokens, doing the minimum amount of homework dramatically improves your odds. Here's a practical checklist.
Before You Buy: Quick DYOR Checklist
- Read the whitepaper or project description. If it's incoherent, copy-pasted, or doesn't exist, that's a hard red flag.
- Check GitHub activity. Is there an active development repo with recent commits? No GitHub at all is suspicious for anything claiming to be a serious project.
- Investigate the team. Are they doxxed (publicly identified)? Do they have a verifiable track record in crypto or tech? Anonymous teams aren't automatically scams, but they carry more risk.
- Review token distribution. If the founders or insiders hold 40%+ of the supply, they can destroy the price the moment they sell. Check tokenomics in the contract or on a block explorer.
- Use a rug checker. Tools like RugCheck or Solscan can reveal mint authority status, freeze authority, and wallet concentration—critical signals for new Solana tokens. See our full guide on Solana rug checkers.
- Check if mint authority is revoked. If a token's mint authority is still active, the team can print unlimited new tokens and crash the price. A revoked mint authority is a major trust signal. Learn more in our guide on mint and freeze authority.
Risk Management When Aping
- Only stake what you can lose completely. Treat every ape as a lottery ticket, not an investment.
- Cap your position at 1–5% of your portfolio. Even a total loss won't be catastrophic if you're sized correctly.
- Set a profit target before you buy. Decide at what price you'll take some gains off the table. Greed after a pump is what turns winners into bagholders.
- Know your stop-loss. If you're not willing to hold through an 80% drawdown, set a mental (or actual) stop-loss and honour it.
- Never FOMO at the top of a spike. If a token has already 10x'd and you're just now seeing it on Twitter, you are almost certainly buying the top.
A useful rule of thumb: An ape who does research isn't really aping anymore—it becomes calculated speculation. The distinction matters, because calculated speculation with good risk management can generate outsized returns. Pure FOMO aping almost never does.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does aping mean in crypto?
Aping (or "aping in") means buying into a cryptocurrency token or NFT quickly and impulsively, without doing meaningful research. It's driven by FOMO, social media hype, and herd mentality. The term comes from the Reddit trading community phrase "apes together strong" and was adopted by crypto communities during the DeFi boom of 2020.
Is aping the same as investing?
No—they're essentially opposites. Investing involves analysing fundamentals, evaluating risk, and making a decision based on evidence. Aping involves bypassing all of that in favour of speed, hype, and gut instinct. Some experienced traders will deliberately take small "ape" positions as high-risk speculation while keeping the rest of their portfolio in more considered positions. For most people, though, aping is purely emotional and often results in losses.
Can you actually make money aping into crypto?
Yes—some people do, and the occasional massive win is part of what keeps the behaviour alive. The problem is survivorship bias: you hear about the person who ape'd into BONK at launch and made 100x; you don't hear about the thousands who ape'd into the 10,000 other Solana tokens that went to zero that same week. The expected value of pure FOMO aping is negative for most people, most of the time. The odds improve significantly if you combine speed with even basic due diligence.
Conclusion: Is Aping Right for You?
Aping in crypto is high-risk speculation, not a strategy—and the odds are stacked against anyone who relies on it as their primary approach. The structure of these markets means that insiders, whales, and early adopters consistently profit at the expense of late FOMO buyers. A tiny percentage of apes strike it rich; the majority end up as exit liquidity.
That doesn't mean you should never take a speculative position on a new token. It means you should do it intentionally, with money you can afford to lose, and with at least a minimal sanity check before hitting buy. Check the team. Look at the token distribution. Verify whether the mint authority is revoked. Set a position size you won't regret.
And if you're on the other side of the equation—if you're building something in crypto rather than just trading it—understanding what draws people to ape in (and what makes them run) is crucial knowledge. You can explore more crypto terminology in our comprehensive crypto glossary.