Crypto Is Dead? Or Is That Just ‘Fud’?

It’s been an awful year for the cryptocurrency industry. Corporate bankruptcies, criminal charges, a slew of government lawsuits. But true believers have a simple response to all the predictions of crypto’s demise: They dismiss them as “FUD.”

Here’s what that means →

Luci Gutiérrez

FUD is an abbreviation for “fear, uncertainty and doubt” — the whirlwind of anti-crypto news, data and online chatter that evangelists deride as propaganda spread by enemies of the new financial order.

The term predates crypto: For decades, corporate experts have used it to refer to disinformation spread by a business to hurt a competitor.

In recent years, though, it’s become a staple of the crypto lexicon. Among blockchain believers, ignoring FUD is a badge of honor, a sign of ironclad commitment to the crypto cause.

Lately, though, the cries of FUD have become less convincing. The list of claims that have been derided as FUD includes warnings that a prominent digital coin called Luna might collapse and that the newfangled crypto bank Celsius was on shaky footing.

Both predictions turned out to be true. (In an act of real chutzpah, the founder of Celsius, Alex Mashinsky, above, continued accusing his critics of spreading FUD, even after his company went bankrupt.)

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

More recently, one of the most powerful figures in crypto has emerged as the emperor of FUD resistance.

On Twitter, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the global crypto exchange Binance, has dismissed everything from media reports to government lawsuits as FUD. He has also adopted the grammatically dubious habit of using FUD as a verb — as in “no need to FUD.”

But perhaps Zhao’s most important contribution to the lexicon is a new shorthand for FUD. (Yes, shorthand for an acronym.)

On Jan. 2, Zhao tweeted a four-item list of dos and don’ts for the crypto world. No. 4 was “ignore FUD, fake news, attacks, etc.”

When Binance was sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in March, Zhao responded to the charges on Twitter.

The text of his tweet was simply “4.”

Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Shop Talk explores idioms of the business world. Nominate a word or term at shoptalk@nytimes.com.