Crypto glossary
Rekt
Rekt is crypto slang, from a misspelling of "wrecked", for suffering a heavy loss, such as a liquidation, a crashed trade or a hacked protocol.
Rekt comes from gamer and internet slang and is a deliberate misspelling of "wrecked". In crypto it describes a person, a position or a project that has been badly damaged: a trader whose leveraged position was liquidated, an investor who bought the top of a memecoin or a DeFi protocol that lost its funds in an exploit.
The word appears constantly on trading forums and social media during crashes, when large waves of liquidations hit leveraged traders on both sides of the market. "Getting rekt" is often posted alongside screenshots of losing positions, partly as a warning and partly as dark humour. The term is also used in the names of sites and newsletters that chronicle DeFi hacks and their causes.
Most of the ways to get rekt are well known: excessive leverage, no stop-loss, concentration in a single illiquid token, unaudited contracts and reused passwords or seed phrases. Limiting position size and leverage is the simplest way to avoid being the one who gets rekt.
Example
A trader who opens a 50x long on bitcoin with 1,000 USD gets rekt when the price falls about 2%, because the position is liquidated and the margin is lost.
