Hodl Meaning: Elon Musk Tweets Crypto Slang Amid Bitcoin, Dogecoin Price Volatility

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent out a cryptic signal about cryptocurrencies with a tweet that triggered speculation about which coin he thinks will be the biggest.

The cryptocurrency market has experienced significant fluctuations recently. One cause of the volatility is U.S. President Joe Biden looking to increase capital gains tax for the wealthy.

Bitcoin went down by more than 20 percent across a week and Ethereum, the second-most valuable cryptocurrency coin, went down by more than 12 percent over 24 hours, a timeframe in which Dogecoin also slumped by 27 percent.

But the SpaceX founder used a term that suggested he favored long-term over short terms gains in a tweet he sent on Saturday.

"What does the future hodl?" he wrote, using the parlance of cryptocurrency buy and hold strategies. Based on a misspelling of "hold," the term describes an approach to investing in cryptocurrency that rejects trading based on short-term price moves.

Musk did not specify any particular coin in the tweet, but it did spark a thread in which users referred to cryptocurrencies they believe are on the up, such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin.

Also mentioned by users was SafeMoon, which was launched less than a month ago but has sparked criticism from experts that it was akin to a pyramid scheme.

Musk, a billionaire who has invested in Bitcoin, has considerable influence in the cryptocurrency market. His comments about Dogecoin, the parody cryptocurrency which launched in 2013, back in February sparked a price surge for the coin.

He called it the "people's crypto," resulting in a 75 percent spike in value for Dogecoin. Musk also provoked a surge in its value on April 16 when he tweeted the caption "Doge barking on the moon" by an image of a Joan Miró painting.

It spurred the altcoin to an all-time high of $0.45, with demand so high that there was a temporary outage on the exchange Robinhood, according to beincrypto.com. The next day, Dogecoin was the eighth most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

This week, a Dogecoin investor, Jaysn Prolifiq—legally known as Glauber Contessoto— told Newsweek that he gambled his life's savings on the token but did not cash out when he allegedly became a millionaire after the price spiked. It has since fallen back.

Newsweek could not independently verify his holding, but he said his $188,000 turned into nearly $2 million of Dogecoin at its peak.

"Looking back I wouldn't have done anything different, because the worst thing you can ever do is try to time the market," he said.