A token that exists to be traded, not to do anything.
The term describes a cryptocurrency lacking a clear purpose, a credible team, or meaningful underlying technology — created to capture speculative interest rather than deliver utility. It’s been part of crypto slang since the early 2010s, used for the wave of low-quality altcoins that followed Bitcoin’s rise.
The label is somewhat subjective — what one trader calls a shitcoin, another might call an early-stage legitimate project — but the common thread is a coin whose price has nothing supporting it beyond attention.