Every term here appears on a trade screen or in a group chat, and every one of them has a price attached when you misread it. Definitions first, then the cost — because a glossary that only defines things teaches you the vocabulary and none of the lesson.
The terms
- Slippage
The gap between the price you were quoted and the price you actually got. You set a tolerance; the trade fails if the market moves past it.
What it costs: On thin liquidity this routinely exceeds the trading fee, and it never appears as a line item.
- Liquidity
How much money sits in the pool backing a token. Deep liquidity means you can sell without moving the price.
What it costs: A token with $5,000 of liquidity cannot absorb a $2,000 exit. You find this out on the way out, not the way in.
- Market cap
Token price multiplied by circulating supply. On a memecoin it is a headline number, not a valuation.
What it costs: A $10M market cap with $20k liquidity is not a $10M asset. Check liquidity, not market cap.
- Fully diluted valuation (FDV)
Market cap if every token that will ever exist were circulating today.
What it costs: A low market cap next to a huge FDV means a lot of supply is waiting to be unlocked onto you.
- Bonding curve
A pricing formula where each purchase raises the price along a fixed mathematical path, used by launchpads before a token gets a normal pool.
What it costs: Buying late on a curve means paying a price set by everyone who bought before you.
- Graduated
A launchpad token that hit its threshold and moved from its bonding curve to an open liquidity pool.
What it costs: Graduation is a milestone, not a quality signal. Most graduated tokens still go to zero.
- Rug pull
The team drains the liquidity pool, leaving holders with a token nobody can sell.
What it costs: Total loss, usually within minutes. Locked liquidity and a renounced contract reduce but do not remove the risk.
- Locked liquidity
The pool tokens are held in a contract that prevents withdrawal until a set date.
What it costs: Check the lock length. A 24-hour lock is theatre.
- Honeypot
A contract that lets you buy but blocks selling.
What it costs: Everything you put in. A tiny test sell before sizing up is the cheapest insurance in crypto.
- Gas
The network's own fee for processing a transaction, paid to validators rather than to any app.
What it costs: Nothing on FOMO for Solana, Base and BNB Chain — those swaps are gasless. Ethereum trades still pay it.
- Taker and maker
A taker fills an existing order at the market price. A maker posts an order and waits.
What it costs: FOMO is a taker-only app: every buy and sell is a market order. There are no maker rebates to earn.
- Round trip
One complete trade — the buy and the matching sell.
What it costs: Two fees, not one. At 0.50% a side that is 1.00% of position size, so a token must rise 1% before you break even.
- Minimum fee
A floor charged when the percentage would be smaller. FOMO's is $0.95 on Solana.
What it costs: It is the single largest cost on this app. DefiLlama's data puts FOMO's realised take rate at 1.24% against a 0.50% headline — that gap is the minimum, multiplied across small trades.
- Self-custody
You hold the keys to the wallet rather than the platform holding your balance.
What it costs: The company failing does not take your funds with it. Losing access to your login can.
- Copy trading
Automatically mirroring another account's trades.
What it costs: You copy the entry, not the exit, the position size, or the reason. Leaderboards rank on realised profit, which selects for people who took enormous risk and won.
- Ape
To buy quickly and in size without research.
What it costs: Named honestly, at least.
- Trenches
Community slang for trading brand-new low-cap tokens, where most launches fail.
What it costs: The base rate. Position sizing matters more here than token selection.
- Referral code
A code entered during signup that permanently discounts your trading fees. On FOMO it is worth 10% off, for the lifetime of the account.
What it costs: Skipping it costs 0.05 percentage points on every trade you ever make, and it cannot be added later.
The three that actually decide your results
Most of the list above is vocabulary. Three of them are the whole game.
Liquidity decides whether you can exit at all. Slippage decides what you get when you do. And the minimum fee decides whether the trade was ever economic — a $50 round trip pays $1.90, which is 3.8% before the price moves at all. Learn those three and the rest is decoration.
The arithmetic behind the third one is on the fee page, and the exit page shows why scaling out in eight small slices costs nearly four times what one exit does.
Where these words came from
Most of this vocabulary is community-generated rather than official, and it drifts. FOMO publishes its own answers pages covering several of these terms, and the Solana documentation is the reference for the mechanics underneath them. For the contract-level risks — honeypots, mint authority, liquidity locks — DexScreener surfaces the checks before you buy, which is the only moment they help.
Next: making a trade on FOMO, what the app actually is, or the referral code that takes 10% off every fee in this glossary.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from one of these. We link them so you can check us rather than trust us.