Diamond Hands

2021

Date: January 2021 · Place: r/wallstreetbets, then crypto Twitter · Figures: Anonymous WSB posters · Keith Gill, exemplar · Tags: WSB, Glyph, Emoji Slang 01. Two Emoji As Identity Diamond hands is a posture, not a meme image. Two emoji, 💎🙌, and a vow to never sell no matter the drawdown. The opposite is paper hands, the trader who folds at the first 10% red candle. The terms exist before GameStop but they crystallize in the January 2021 squeeze, when holding through volatility becomes a public identity performance. Keith Gill posts a single image of a hand of diamond cards and 💎🙌 on Twitter at the peak. It is the most-liked finance tweet of the year. 02. Migration To Crypto By spring 2021 diamond hands has fully migrated to crypto Twitter. Every Dogecoin holder, every Shiba Inu bagholder, every BAYC floor watcher uses the same two emoji as a signal of conviction or, increasingly, as cope. The phrase outlives the bull market. In late 2022, after Luna and FTX, diamond hands reads as elegy. It is the most successful pure-emoji idiom of the era, financial language compressed to a glyph pair that any 14-year-old on Discord can deploy without translation. Sources • KnowYourMeme, 'Diamond Hands' • Keith Gill Twitter (@TheRoaringKitty), January 2021 posts • Bloomberg, 'How Diamond Hands Became Finance's Most Important Phrase' (February 2021)