There's a Telegram for People to Scream Over the Bitcoin Crash

By Kate Irwin

Photo: Ryan Snaadt/Unsplash

With Bitcoin down 30% in the past week, some crypto traders have taken to Telegram to “voice” their feelings.

In the “Bear Market Screaming Therapy Group” on Telegram, members are only allowed to post voice notes of themselves screaming. Anything else will result in an instant ban from the group, which currently has about 75 members.

So far, more than a dozen different members have contributed to the group, posting voice notes of themselves screaming, yelling, groaning, and wailing in various pitches and rhythms.

Co-founder of NFT renting protocol Rentable World emiliano.eth shared the group Tuesday morning on Twitter, calling out the "degenerate" community, or crypto obsessives that engage in high-risk trading.

“Hey degen, are you stressed? Just let it all out,” he wrote, along with a link to join the group.

Matt Hussey, editorial director of NEAR Protocol (and former editor-in-chief of Decrypt) responded to the news of the Telegram group with “#meIRL.” 

The group’s featured image is of a Pepe frog yelling, often referred to as the “REEEEEEE” meme. Pepe the Frog was created back in 2005 by Matt Furie and has since become an internet symbol for meme culture and “degen” culture.

As the broader market downturn continues, yelling online has become the crypto trader’s latest coping mechanism after the rise of Goblintown Ethereum NFTs at the end of May and beginning of June, where holders made incoherent groaning sounds and role-played as urine-loving goblin creatures in late-night Twitter Spaces.

While some crypto traders move toward screaming as a coping mechanism, many mental health experts have argued that “scream therapy” is pseudoscience. Scientific research or no, it obviously feels good.

Developing social channels based on exchanging a single message isn’t exactly new, of course. Back in 2014, the “Yo” app was launched with the sole purpose of enabling users to send each other the greeting “Yo.”

For crypto enthusiasts, there was the “gm” app, a self-described “meme app” which only allowed users to greet each other with “gm,” or “good morning,” a common acronym thrown around on Crypto Twitter and Discord. But the gm app was shut down back in September after a hacker reportedly gained access to user data.

With the “Bear Market Screaming Therapy Group,” we’ve now transcended language.